Human Legacy Project

by Christian Cantrell

  The meeting is upstairs in the library. The opening into the room is wide, and there are no doors to close it off from the rest of the upstairs. The walls are lined with shelves of books that the People's Party doesn't mind you reading, and there are closed-circuit cameras looking down on the room from every corner. There are two long tables pushed together end-to-end in the center of the room, and the people sitting at them with their magazines and notebook computers don't look up. I take the empty seat between Jakub, an information architect turned hacker, and my wife.

  Ex-wife, I should say. We divorced shortly after Mount Legacy was shut down — after we decided that living together made us an easy target. It was too hard not to say things to each other that we shouldn't say, and not to spontaneously do stupid things that would draw attention. It was easier to be alone. There weren't many of us left so we had to be smart, spread ourselves out, play the odds. All of us who were together eventually split up. The women accused the men of seeing prostitutes and we accused them of stealing money. Not that The Party cared. It was easier to get a divorce than it was to get a marriage license.

  I'm surprised to see that I'm not the last to arrive. Sasha still isn't here. I saw someone walking along the wall scanning book titles when I came in, but it wasn't him. We don't have much time left, so we can't wait. I put my notebook on the table and open it. The screen lights up, then dims as it adjusts to the ambient light in the room. I have to slouch down in my chair to see it clearly because the duel-layer LCD projects two distinct images: one straight ahead for me to see, and one at an upward angle for the cameras and anyone standing over my shoulder.

  I clear my throat and rub at my ear with my finger. That activates the audio. We are all wearing voice impulse sensors under our shirts which allow us to talk without speaking. All you have to do is go through the motions of talking without actually saying anything and the VIS converts the muscular impulses into synthesized speech, then broadcasts it over an encrypted short range radio link to the tiny receivers in our ears. We've trained them so that the voices sound very close to our own. Even the inflections and accents aren't bad.

  "Where's Sasha?" I say. Nobody gives any indication that they heard me, but I know they did.

  "Nobody's heard from him," my wife says. She's slowly turning the pages of a thick catalog. Rory is across the table from us with his notebook open and Yuuka is next to him reading a novel.

  Rory was arrested years ago, but was released because of connections he has through his twin brother. He's an electronic surveillance expert who sells Bing Xiang refrigerators during the day. Yuuka is an expert in social surveillance. She is a call girl employed by party members with an Asian fetish, and she hears things that could never be heard any other way.

  "I have the instructions," Jakub says. "Ready for this? We're supposed to deorbit the satellites."

  He transfers the instructions to me. I see a four-by-four grid of live video streams on my screen: 16 identical satellites, each filming the one beside it with its visual diagnostic camera. I'm waiting for someone to elaborate, but nobody does.

  "You mean destroy them?" I finally say.

  "It would certainly seem so," Jakub says. Rory stretches and uses the opportunity to glance around the room.

  "That doesn't make any sense," I say. "Why would he want us to destroy the satellites?"

  "The only explanation," Yuuka says, "is to keep the government from capturing them. It was always just a matter of time."

  "But not yet," I say. "There has to be something else. Something about transferring the data first. If we destroy them now, it's all over."

  "Maybe that's the point," my wife says. "Maybe it's time for all this to be over."

  PART FOUR

  The goal of the Human Legacy Project was to give everyone who wanted it the chance to live forever. Immortality was not achieved physically, the project taught, but through our influence on future generations. The HLP was to take history out of the hands of historians (who had a tendency to simplify, dehumanize, embellish, forget, revise, censor, and, of course, flat-out lie), and put it into the hands of the people who were making it. By providing future generations with a free, detailed, tangible, and personal sense of the past, Omo believed humanity could finally begin to learn from and build on history rather than repeat it. He believed that the HLP could inspire us to move beyond the perceived limitations of the human race and become something more than what we ever thought we could be. The path to the future, Omo told his archivists, was hidden in the past, and the mission of the HLP was to reveal it.

  Omo tasked his archivists with the impossible: record the life stories of every living human being on the planet. Everyone's life was important. Everyone mattered. Every single person had some vital insight or piece of knowledge that nobody else had. Every story had the potential to teach or inspire, and hence to change the world.

  The data was initially stored in the Library of Congress as part of their Digital Collections project. In developed nations, everyone was given free access to sets of tools for capturing their own life stories and the stories of their ancestors using whatever format or type of media they were most comfortable with. In less developed parts of the world, the HLP employed thousands of archivists to document as many lives as possible, from the wealthiest landowners and politicians to the poorest farmers and nomads. As the project become more widely publicized, volunteers from all over the world began assisting with the archival process. At its peak, the HLP had over half a million volunteers and employees worldwide.

  Omo's job was logistics. He meticulously monitored political, cultural, and scientific events around the world, and fed them into computer models to help determine where and how to allocate resources. He moved more archivists across the border into Mexico when he saw that the collapse of the Mexican government was imminent under increasingly brutal attacks from drug cartels. When gravity-sensing satellites confirmed that India had only enough ground water left for roughly a decade of consumption, he mandated an aggressive recruiting campaign in Mumbai, Calcutta, Delhi, and Bangalore. As falling oil prices threatened to throw the economies of OPEC nations into turmoil, Omo moved archivists into the Middle East, Northern Africa, and South America to try to stay ahead of the wars and genocidal crusades his models predicted. And when thousands of nuclear power plants were brought online across North America and Western Europe, Omo doubled the advertising budgets of the London, Paris, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles offices; he had seen the soaring rates of cancer and the investigations into nuclear waste contractors long before the first child ever got sick.

  Phase two of the Human Legacy Project began the day it was announced that, for the first time since 1820, a United States presidential candidate would run unopposed. After the previous election brought the lowest voter turnout in US history, the People's Party began to amass power and support at an unprecedented rate. It was clear, Omo explained in an organization-wide letter, that it was time to remove the archives from government control.

  The HLP had purchased an entire mountain in Ogden, Utah under the name Powder Valley Resort Holdings, LLC, and was already in the process of hollowing it out. Omo's technical team began designing data formats, transfer protocols, high-speed optical drives, and corrosion-resistant storage media. The facility was powered by their own geothermal installations, and it was protected by a private security detail. The People's Party condemned the construction of Mount Legacy and the transfer of data from the Library of Congress, insisting that such important historical assets were better off entrusted to the government than to a team of "volunteer housewives and armchair historians." When the HLP continued to refuse to work with the federal government, the People's Party shut down the entire Digital Collection project, hired their own archivists, and formed the Department of Human History. It took less than a year for material from DHH to become required curriculum in every public and private academic institution in the country.

  Midway through The Party's thi
rd term, the Human Legacy Project was declared a terrorist organization and officially banned. The government accused the HLP of falsifying history, spreading misinformation about the United States government, harboring known criminals, and stockpiling weapons. Phase two of the HLP ended the morning the FBI and the Utah National Guard surrounded and stormed the facility at Mount Legacy.

  Omo was arrested, and what was left of the HLP went underground. It continued to operate as small, independent, decentralized cells, but its charter was no longer data collection and preservation. The consensus among the archivists was that the project had failed — that it was destroyed by the very thing it was supposed to prevent. Information and knowledge, it turned out, had not been effective weapons. In the end, it was not enough to empower yourself if you weren't also weakening your enemies.

  Targeting government facilities had been relatively easy at first. The concrete barriers along the streets were ineffective against high-powered, directed, and shrapnel-packed blasts, and motorbikes could be used to simply pass right between flower boxes and climb up front steps. Remote-controlled aerial vehicles from any hobby shop could land enough explosives on a roof to take out the top two floors, and it was even possible to get bombs inside buildings simply by mailing them as long as you sent enough all at once to beat the random sampling. Whenever it proved too difficult to get devices into a building, it was usually easy enough to get the people inside to come out and congregate around official-looking explosive-packed vans just by pulling a few fire alarms or calling in a bomb threat.

  But HLP operations got harder very quickly. Building perimeters got stronger, entire streets were shut down, and materials became more difficult to obtain. Small blasts were still easy to manufacture, but delivering them precisely enough to do significant damage was becoming nearly impossible. Automated defense systems were installed on roofs, and every government package was imaged and usually even opened before it was put on a truck, and then again as it came off. Anything foreign or suspicious was destroyed long before a high-value target was within its blast radius. The only thing that moved freely between government facilities and the outside world were party members themselves.

  There were never any attempts to recruit suicide bombers. The reward for giving up an HLP terrorist was too high to risk approaching anyone who couldn't be trusted, and there was far more fear and complacency under the People's Party than radicalism. The best way to get a human being to deliver a payload into a government facility was to do it without their knowledge.

  The first round of attacks killed around 300 people. This time, the government responded with more than just increased security, additional procedures, and new technologies. These were the kinds of attacks that The Party needed to justify instituting an entirely new police force.

  The People's Police targeted anyone considered an enemy of the state. They didn't wear uniforms or drive marked cars, and they seldom reported in. They wore street clothes, held common jobs, lived in apartment buildings, used public transportation, and carried government-issued handsets like everyone else. But their handsets fed them names and locations and special instructions. The People's Police operated autonomously, but were capable of coordinating and striking in-force when necessary. They concealed a variety of weapons and devices, and were authorized to use them in any way they saw fit. As long as objectives were met, no questions were asked.

  Slipping explosives into jacket pockets and implanting them in handsets or the heels of shoes got to be too risky with the proliferation of the PP, so the HLP began researching new types of explosives. In particular, they focused on a technology called biomunitions. The downside of biomunitions was that an armed subject couldn't be detonated on demand like a conventional bomb which meant they were less reliable and precise. But the series of catalysts were easy to deliver and completely undetectable. They could be slipped into a meal or a drink, or delivered in the form of hand cream or foot powder. They could be fed to bomb-sniffing dogs, or to pigeons who nested on the windowsills of Supreme Court justices, or mixed into formula given to babies in the federal daycare facilities. What biomunitions lacked in precision and predictability, they more than made up for in sheer volume.

  When the government figured out how the HLP was still operating, they began requiring anyone who worked in a federal facility to use government rations. Every drink, every meal, every pill, and every hygiene product had to be issued by the government and sealed in tamper-proof packaging. A certain percentage of federal employees were randomly assigned to work from home every day, and office buildings were divided up into hundreds of sealed compartments designed to contain blasts. So many people began leaving their jobs that an emergency measure was passed which declared that every federal position — from elected officials to postal carriers — was now a military assignment, and any attempt to resign or otherwise leave would be considered desertion. The United States was officially at war with the HLP.

  Omo was unexpectedly released from prison and placed under minimum security house arrest. The PP imposed no restrictions on his communications, nor on who was permitted to visit him. Party members claimed that his release was a concession to the HLP — a sign of the government's desire to begin the process of reconciliation — but the HLP recognized the move as a desperate attempt to draw out key members. Omo knew that it was far too dangerous to attempt to contact his archivists directly, so when he was ready to talk, he addressed the entire world instead.

  The only news organization willing to risk speaking with Omo was the Arabic-language news network, Al Jazeera. They interviewed him at his home and managed to air the entire exchange continuously for over six hours before it was taken down. Omo announced to the world that the Human Legacy Project was alive and well, that it had already entered Phase Three, and that it was now impossible to stop. It had become ubiquitous and decentralized, powered by an autonomous and rapidly mutating piece of software called a worm which had been living inside the federal and global networks since before Omo left the SETI Institute. It was almost certainly installed on every device that had ever connected to a network, and not only had it archived all the data from Mount Legacy before the facility went offline, but it had also likely discovered and captured better than 99.9% of all data stored on every accessible network. The HLP virus had archived and organized, for all intents and purposes, the entire sum of human knowledge, forming a detailed chronological record of all of mankind's achievements and failures. The data was stored, Omo said, in the one place where even the government could no longer get at it: the constellation of ROSA satellites orbiting over 12,000 miles above the surface of the Earth.

  But the endgame was just beginning, Omo told the world. The HLP wasn't finished yet. From time to time, the project would detect when it required human intervention, and it would automatically contact the necessary archivists. Until then, his instructions were to stand down. There was nothing left to do but to wait for the fourth and final stage to begin.

  That night, the chief of the Washington, DC Al Jazeera bureau was arrested, and the next day, Omo was exiled back to eastern Africa. Despite supposedly being inoculated before he left, Omo mysteriously contracted malaria and died beside the river from which he took his name.

  PART FIVE

  Initiating the burn sequence to deorbit the satellites only requires biometric authentication from five of us, so we don't need Sasha. But the problem is doing it without drawing attention. All of us taking turns placing our palms against notebook screens or peering into camera lenses for retina scans wouldn't exactly be subtle, so we settle on voice analysis. Yuuka sneezes and excuses herself. Rory blesses her and my wife asks her if she needs a tissue. I comment on how everyone at work is getting sick, and Jakub mentions he could use a couple of days in bed himself. We complete the exchange, then go back to what we were doing. I can see on my screen that authentication was successful. Instructions that were probably written decades ago are now being compiled. When they are ready, they wil
l be transmitted to whichever satellite is in position. That satellite will then transmit them to its neighbor, and the process will continue until the entire constellation is prepared to begin Phase Four.

  I think about what my wife said when we discovered what was about to happen. Maybe it's time for all this to be over. There is a part of all of us that wants the HLP to fail. There's a part of us that's tired of being scared all the time, that hates suspecting everyone around us of being PP, that wants to live the same controlled and methodical and mundane existence as everyone else. I miss my wife. It takes all of my self-control to sit here beside her and pretend that I don't know her. I can smell her shampoo and I remember how she tastes and how she feels. I want to hold her hand. I want to leave here with her. I want to sit beside her on the train ride home and laugh together. Maybe we will. Maybe this is as much of a beginning as it is an end.

  The library has gotten more crowded than it should be this late. I look down at my watch and then tap on it like it's stopped which gives me an excuse to look around for a wall clock. I see a man walk by the library entrance, glance in, and keep walking. Sasha. There's something wrong. I reach for the lid of my notebook to close it when I feel the unmistakable cold metal of a gun barrel pressed hard against the back of my head.