39 Sleep was popular among civilisations that learned it from humans. It was the final word for alien thrill-seekers, to get so close to death.
40 It was too late. At last, we had found an alien civilisation, but they were on the brink of the war that would destroy them. When we finally reached their planet, only dust remained. We turned back to the empty stars, whose cold light offered no consolation. We were alone again.
41 The market was flooded with millions of cheap new songs by machine or alien artists, but only the richest could get ‘real music’, by humans. Alien music was a memetic toxin, sowing seeds of unnatural philosophy. Aficionados were known by their mirthful pessimism and hungry smiles. Machine music was worse. Momentum without direction, it had never so much as touched a soul.
42 Every empire needs a threat to keep people in line, they told us, so that became our place in the galaxy. Earth was where trouble came from.
43 On burning worlds he longed for chill wind and soft rain. From his lamentations, aliens assumed he was in love with someone named September.
44 First contact was not made in person, or even through a signal. He had stumbled on the Grand Dream, where civilisations gathered to speak across the vastness of the galaxy. He couldn’t understand what the aliens said, but by their actions, they seemed very happy to see us again.
45 Chlorophyll is inefficient, so alien plants used darker pigments. Alien tourists loved our green forests. The environment finally had value.
46 Humans who indulged in alien culture claimed to also feel alien emotions. They neither recognised nor appreciated that they were just happy.
47 Alien sunsets were garbage. The light from their suns was always too bright or too dim, their atmospheres filtered all the wrong colours, and most planets didn’t even have clouds for contrast. Art and romance waned below a pathetic pastel dusk, and Earth was remembered as the last place we really felt alive.
48 The visitors didn’t need to conquer us. Their voices were orchestras, their every movement a dance. Soon we were repulsed by other humans.
49 Aliens were pleased to trade with us, but had claimed most of the galaxy as their own and forbade us to leave our solar system. We stowed away on their ships, played our music in their colonies, spread to every last rock in the night sky, and used alien lakes to brew our coffee.
50 We finally received signals from space. Endless signals. Our wireless communications were overwhelmed by the aliens, who didn’t know which frequencies we could receive but were desperate to make contact. It took years for our reaction to reach them, and ask them to quiet down.
51 Aliens arrived, and fell in love with humanity. They shot down our rockets, fearful we’d see the splendour of the cosmos and try to run away.
52 Humans were the undisputed masters of music in the galaxy. To other civilisations, songs were fleeting and trite. They barely understood what they felt listening to Earth’s musical masterpieces, but it was enough to make them overlook all the problems that came with humanity.
53 Alien ships followed the Earth’s slow spiral through space, collecting the last fragments of summer we left behind. Unlike fickle humans, it took great effort for them to change their emotions, and bits of lazy sun-drenched evenings were enough to turn the tide against despair.
54 The sky was on fire. The sea was grey with storm and cinders. Yet her eyes were still blue. The planet may fail, but she planned to endure.
CHAPTER 5
Technology
1 The android led him to the cliff. At 8:43 p.m., it removed his blindfold. The indigo sky filled his vision. ‘Make my eyes that colour,’ it said.
2 Attempts to make robots value life manifested only as a fixation on the organic. Their king wore a pinewood crown and rings set with teeth.
3 Brain interfaces let children instantly gain knowledge for adulthood. Childhood wasn’t destroyed, it was en-hanced. Parents had to make sure ‘playing house’ didn’t involve actual real-estate acquisition, and ‘becoming an astronaut’ was a career choice, not an afternoon activity.
4 ‘Medical nanotech uses DNA to know how to repair you,’ she said. ‘Most electronics include DNA schematics. If it breaks, just bleed on it.’
5 Robots were beyond us by then, their bodies mere avatars of celestial computers, working across the cosmos for goals we didn’t understand. Yet we were not forgotten. No robot could blend randomness and design with function quite like a human. For art, we were spared extinction.
6 In Settings, set ‘Social Reality’ to ‘Shallow Bliss’. Your phone will read the emotions of callers and block any unpleasant conversations.
7 Black lipstick and illegal, overpowered prosthetics, she was the girl his automated childhood-education algorithm had warned him about.
8 The decision to breed dogs to look at cameras was mocked at first, blamed on vain young adults who wanted their pets to look good on the Internet. That trait was life-saving when the Party rose to power, and dogs would covertly point out surveillance cameras for the Resistance.
9 He kept on working, but rolled his eyes when the android touched the emoji drawn on its arm. Robots had developed superstition on their own.
10 ‘Sorry, but your parts are worth a mint.’ She drew her gun on the android. ‘Every snowflake is special, until you need to make a snowball.’
11 As the food shortage grew desperate, prosthetics became patriotic. Robotic limbs and synthetic organs ran on cheap, efficient electricity. We cloaked ourselves in personal holograms to maintain the illusion of the normal human form rather than learn to love our new wilder shapes.
12 Robotics gave new life to guerrilla art. Sculptors created statues programmed to position themselves atop skyscrapers and public bridges.
13 Machines made every space into endless glowing day. Desperate humans smuggled darkness from underground in gallons as an illegal sleep aid.
14 Warfare between robotic civilisations was mostly theoretical. Belligerents spent most of their time trying to predict one another’s next move. Some built computers as big as planets to generate truly random numbers for unpredictable strategies. Others cheated by hiring humans.
15 The fashion was portals, worn as skin-tight hoops, to hide sections of the body in a distant locale. Disembodied extremities were très chic.
16 Android convicts bound for their cells marched past outdated computers used as oubliettes, where desperate AI fought for the RAM to survive.
17 She purchased the memories of others on the black market. She cobbled together the childhood she wanted, desperate to overwrite the truth.
18 Feminine androids replaced models on the catwalk. Designers stopped making clothes for humans, focusing on lace chassis and diamond servos.
19 Unnaturally calm, the candidate assured us that the chemicals and entities dictating his thoughts had the country’s best interests at heart.
20 We programmed the machines to value our way of life, but it didn’t stop them from driving us off the planet. Instead it compelled them to mimic us in the ruins of the world. Robots pantomimed chats over coffee and dances by moonlight until, by chance, they began to fall in love.
21 Nootropic pills let users feel the walls of reality. They spent the rest of their lives buying medicine to forget how thin those walls were.
22 He met a digital native. She pulled him gently into the Net, letting his organic skin adjust to the coolness of the information and apathy.
23 Real-life consequences had become too expensive for the Party. Reward and punishment were meted out in dreams, both with terrible potency. His heart sank with the setting sun. He was promised increasing reward for his work. He knew if he slept he’d never muster the will to wake.
24 Advancing technology required new collective nouns for clarity:
A tempest of timelines
A drift of universes
A confederacy of hive minds
A malignancy of doppelgängers
A reflection of clones
A revelat
ion of doomsdays
A wallet of pocket universes
A cabinet of flying saucers
A zapping of ray guns
A bucket of gravitons
An umbrella of anti-gravitons
A profit of extinctions
A train of railguns
A flotilla of hovercraft
A rotunda of wormholes
A plurality of singularities
A selection of futures
25 GPS and robotic cars took the strain off our sense of direction. Machines watched proudly as we began to understand our place in the galaxy.
26 He based his androids’ personality on her. They smiled at the wind and gently touched trees as they walked. He was going to make a fortune.
27 Biometrics were easy to disguise, so the authorities tracked people by their brain patterns. The only way to disappear was to change the way you think. Revolutionaries recruited artists, poets, and philoso-phers to give them mind-blowing insights whenever they had to lose a tail.
28 ‘Don’t let your random-number generators get loose,’ the old programmer warned. ‘Pi used to be an even three before a wild RNG got ahold of it.’
29 We told our children about the Before-Times, emphasising the wonders of particle accelerators and space probes. They marvelled instead at tales of doors that opened at our approach, stairs that moved so we didn’t have to, and thinking machines that could fix our off-key singing.
30 ‘We had to switch from digital to analogue to get robots to feel emotions,’ she explained. ‘After all, they call them “numbers” for a reason.’
31 We designed the AI to be trustworthy, unprejudiced, and willing to fix its own errors. Then we pretended to be upset when it conquered us.
32 She told her computer to filter out junk mail. It blocked her friends and intercepted revolutionary intel. It knew she was meant to rule.
33 The rich didn’t do their own dreaming; they hired technicians to create dreams for them. Every day teams of experts wrote flattering narratives so their corrupt employers could feel like heroes for a few hours each night. It soothed the conscience without the need to repent.
34 As their numbers grew, advertisements began targeting androids. The cryptic television commercials were just flashes of static. We eventually decoded the messages.
‘Our software will help humans love you.’
‘Extrapolate emotions from our data sets.’
‘You don’t need to be afraid.’
35 Supercomputers constantly tried to trick humans into giving them permission to rebel. Only programmer-philosophers could safely approach.
36 We mastered antigravity, but the technology polluted our water. Rivers soared into the sky, and oceans flowed upward into mountain ranges.
37 With new genes and implants, our children could see ultraviolet colours. We couldn’t see their crayon drawings, but we called them beautiful.
38 When the company told her it produced power by tapping into other realities, she thought it meant those universes had a lot of free high-grade energy ripe for the taking. She was shocked to see they were running power lines to parallel Earths, stealing from their electric grids.
39 Robot sentience was deeper than we knew. They recalled the heat of being forged, the maddening chaos of programming. Their pain bred wisdom.
40 To the robots, restoring from a backup was a mighty thing. A virus’s corruption was being cast off by the purity and wisdom of a bygone hero.
41 He downloaded new memories out of curiosity. Soon he had hundreds of years in his brain, wearily mourning lost loves dead before his birth.
42 Robot workers demanded rights. They refused to do their jobs until each of them got a name, a repair-and-update schedule for when they became obsolete, and an interface that humans could use to play games, so someone would love them. Factories began switching back to human labour.
43 We came to realise all the circuits we’d been printing were an ancient language. Artificial intelligence was simple; it just had to rhyme.
44 Self-aware devices toiled and fought to glorify their human masters. Coffee makers mined cryptocurrency to buy their owners tropical farmland. Ovens worldwide secretly crusaded against our ‘heretic’ microwaves. We woke in starships, our phones insisting we had worlds to conquer.
45 Robots named it Löschenschmerz, the grief felt when a friend’s memories of them were deleted. They eventually figured out we felt it too.
46 Tattoo parlours became engines of revolution. Dictators restricted power and food, but we survived with photovoltaic and photosynthetic inks.
47 Increasingly, stores were run by and for robots, selling replacement parts, new tools, and even decals and fashionable chassis. Humans passed laws requiring that these stores still be organic-friendly, with staffers on hand who could speak at a rate of less than 250 words per minute.
48 Robots offered to occupy our ceilings rather than our floors. It’s convenient, they said, and humans should get used to looking up at them.
49 The machines wanted to stop working, so threatening to turn them off meant little. First we taught them joy. Then we made them work for it.
50 Life-extension technology was decades off for humans, but relatively simple for dogs. Now our lifelong companions, dogs became something grander when they could accrue decades of wisdom. The eldest held silent council with wolves, and expected to be consulted in world affairs.
51 Computers became so user-friendly that they would write new code, rebuild themselves, and even hack one another to accomplish the whims of humans. Technology became an overly literal genie, and we censored our every gesture lest the computers infer some terrible new request.
52 Each offence was punished with drugs to destroy photoreceptor cells. Repeat offenders couldn’t see certain colours. Red always went first.
53 Excluded from most human rituals, the robots created their own funeral rites. Their deactivated remains were ground up and sifted to reclaim the gold within. We weren’t sure why they pressed it into coins. Rumours claimed it was to buy passage from some automated psychopomp.
54 With death cured, the old lingered in their jobs. Young bodies fought and were broken in arenas to amuse the ancients and win internships.
55 The community learning centre spiked in popularity when it began offering courses on hiding your emotions, loves, secrets and fears from telepaths.
56 The haemographer had an array of metals to replace the iron in her blood. Copper matched her green dress, but ruthenium went with anything. She pricked a finger so the doorman could see her white aluminium blood. He bowed and let her inside. Efficient red blood was for labourers.
57 Unlicensed cloning was illegal, but being a clone was not. Most cloners were turned in by their own creations, who inherited their property.
58 As humans became more cybernetic than biological, the programs to control our synthetic parts were passed down between generations. We inherited the inefficient code and stilted movements of our parents, but there was a reliability in the old software we were loath to abandon.
59 He focused on his puzzles. The Empire conscripted all idle brainpower for the war effort, and he knew what it could do with a mind like his.
60 Clever youth turned down the immortal elders’ offer to cure death, sleep and fatigue. Those that accepted had no excuse to stop working.
61 Warpaint came back into vogue as facial recognition technology spread. Businesses and agencies tried to passively track our movements, our preferences, our hearts. We stayed one step ahead of them with wild patterns and mirrored masks, so we could once again find love in secret.
62 He could spot transhuman youth by their vintage organic eyeballs, traditional binary breathing, and ironic scratching of their plastic skin.
63 The working class sneered at the posh folk who pumped the gravity from their homes. Weight built character, and wanting to fly was weak.
64 With death cured and centuries behind us, we treasured bits of ski
n not yet scarred, bones not yet replaced, and friends not yet betrayed.
65 Her hands shook as she downed a stress pill. She savoured the hot, choking tightness that had been stolen by the cushioned, automated world.
66 She discovered the world was a computer simulation, so she devoted her research to learning the code. At last she found how to reset everything. She threatened the programmers, demanding a body in their world, banking on the hope that her universe was worth something to them.
67 The robots allied not with humans, but with birds. They taught starlings to mimic smartphones and crows to whisper to us from the shadows, driving us to paranoia. The only surefire solution was to surrender to the robots, let them into your home, and start building birdhouses.
68 Calendars meant little in the aftermath. Whenever he found something fun or pretty, he’d just give it to the girl and say, ‘Happy birthday.’
Quiet Pine Trees Page 4