by Kali Altsoba
Data search: death.
Result: taxes, immortality. Old Beleivers.
Historia Humana, Volume X, Part VI (d)
Most people people found greatly extended lifespan an escalating burden. As they aged they grew distant from fresh generations of descendants, and were unwanted in return. They learned that sediments of psychological and philosophical angst accumulated to levels that weighed too heavily on the mind. They stopped taking suspensor. Others found elongated lives intensely boring and killed themselves at even younger ages. Experience taught that 130 years or so was the maximum desirable lifespan, after which death relieved the burden of age depression.
Trying to live too long exceeded benefits from calming drugs, therapy and religion. It meant being overtaken by creeping decrepitude and mental stress that wore down the will to live, with death seen as a welcome release from ‘stretching,’ as the new condition was called. Death was once again accepted as natural and celebrated by the willing dying, and by extended family and communities. Every year hundreds of millions, reaching well over a billion per year in our time, gather family around them in white stone halls of the Life Temples, dispense all worldly property to whomever they choose, and in respect and acceptance consent to assisted death.
Older faiths survive on worlds founded to preserve or revive them, and among pockets of Old Believers scattered over many worlds. But the majority now turn to the last rites and celebration of the Life Temples, spurning old religions and the weak consolation of philosophy. They reject the inherent divisiveness of theologies born of claims to special revelation or unique insight into the minds of the gods or purposes of creation. This is an era of New Enlightenment, an Age of Bodhi in the spirit realm to match the Satya Yuga that blesses the material world…
…population pressure finally forced laws compelling suicide or forfeiture of property at Final Age on most of the Thousand Worlds, irrespective of underlying culture or faith. On free worlds these forced-suicide laws are rescinded today, or simply left fallow and unenforced for those very few who do not respect or attend the Life Temples at their end. Instead, forfeiture of 95% of income and inheritance to descendants and dependents is enforced once a person passes Final Age, established in law in most systems at 130 USY. In advanced polities, a humane choice is now offered to any who continue past Final Age when 5% of wealth from more than a century of private accumulation is insufficient: basic palliative care on the general welfare rolls.
Not everyone accepts to end life this way. On some worlds prisons fill with pathetic souls willing to commit almost any crime to extend personal existence a few more years, robbing and killing to pay huge deterrent fees charged for each five-year extension beyond age 130. All who kill are sentenced to hard time without suspensor, then state-suicided or executed according to local laws. All property of criminal condemned is forfeit to the Life Temples, with the shamed bodies left to rot above ground in public places, to encourage contempt for death dissenters.
Some exceptionally rich extropians hoard fortunes, willing to live long past when three or four generations of descendants are already gone. Nine centuries ago their wealth permitted them to move from world to world to stay ahead of evolving mandatory Final Age laws. Then they retreated to a few dozen resort worlds. Only three still operate today, outside Orion in the Globular Clusters. These oceanic gems compete to host wandering ‘Immortals,’ mainly by abolishing all inheritance laws. On these outlier, and some would say outlaw, worlds the obscenely wealthy are permitted to retain all goods and credits even at the price of penury for their abandoned heirs. In return for haven from both death and taxes, they pay cosmically high ‘fees’ to local authorities and more to those with the unpleasant task of tending to badly decaying rich folk who are also exceptionally egocentric.
However, most are content with Final Age and choose the Life Temples at their due time. At least, they do so in free systems of Orion. The great majority of Humanity do not have even this choice. The 700 billion living on Imperium worlds must suicide by 140 on their own terms, or they are forced to do so by the state. As far as is known about closed Daura, the Tyrant offers no choice to his 945 billion subjects. Even before the Grim Revolution, Daura lacked the means and social will to extend its people’s lifespans to 130. There and in a few other unenlightened systems, death is doled out by Nature as it always was. Or by the state, Death’s ancient assistant.
Sanjay
Lowestoft-on-Stamos, the main government center and first capital city of the Calmar Union, follows a wide curve of the slowly ambling Stamos River. Its 85 million residents enjoy the always temperate climate of the austral continent of Caspia, twin capital world of the Union.
Outsiders say it’s boring and stodgy. Its residents know it more as a contented metropolis, home to well-satisfied people who work almost exclusively in the vast federal bureaucracy. Most outsiders think Lowestofters are boring and stodgy, too. Truth be told, they are. Too content, too isolated, too influential to care what anyone thinks of them or their city. They’re happily elite.
An old saying is literally true of a thirty-square klic government section. “You can roll up the walkways in Lowestoft overnight.” City custodians shutter all office buildings and stop all moving walkways and tram-streets at 7:30 precisely. Every day. No deviations. No exceptions.
Get stuck in the office for any reason and you better be prepared to spend the night in a snug kapuseru, drinking weak beer and eating mediocre sushi. Many a federal stiff working as a Twelfth Level clerk or a Seventh Level supply administrator uses that lame excuse with his wife or partner, after a tryst with a co-worker. So many, the vulgarism “getting kapped” is common in divorce proceedings. Not Sanjay Pradip. Never. He goes home to Mrs. Pradip on time each night.
The six-tower MoD stands alone on the far western edge of the immense, sprawling city. It never closes, its lights are always on, its lifts are always moving, and helos buzz on-and-off six roof parks and hundreds of side pads. From outside, a steady swarm of helos give MoD an appearance and even the sound of a hive of hornets. And so, “The Hornet’s Nest” it is.
Lowestoft-on-Stamos is senior sister of twin capital cities, on twin capital worlds, only by virtue of an earlier foundation year than Barda, on Kars. Sanjay is proud of its senior status, but more of its profound influence on, well, everything. Yes, Barda is where they make the laws but Lowestoft-on-Stamos is where they make the rules. Rules are harder to evade or change.
‘Yes, the Lok Sabha holds sway on Kars, where the Great Houses draw the public’s eye and memex. But this is the true capital. Here on Caspia we have real power, to actually govern.’ Sanjay means bureaucrats like him. He thinks it every day as he arrives at the MoD.
The Hornet’s Nest rises above the west end of Lowestoft-on-Stamos, one of three all-government cities on Caspia. There are other cities, but it’s the big three that count. Lowestoft most of all. The metallic-glass exterior, shaped with melted mayenite and electron-trapping, shimmers in bright morning air and reflects like an ice-sheet mirrors an arctic sun. The external coating makes the whole outer skin of the tower conductive, blocking electronic eavesdropping and preventing even accidental non-secure communication by agents.
Sanjay pours a fresh cup of hot tea, as he does every day. Several times each day, in fact. Sipping fine tea, he indulges little self-congratulations for his special talents and career good fortune. This inner habit takes up much of his time as Director of Political Intelligence, the top civilian job in the Calmar Intelligence Service, attached to MoD. ‘It’s good to be on Caspia.’
Sanjay is a little, refined and delicate man who looks a bit like a small-town undertaker who never quite gets around to telling you the final cost of the flowers or cremation. His skin is tan-dark, his hair black as night-side in a cold nebula, but billowing lush from replanting every ten years or so. It’s been eight years since his last furrowing, so it’s thinning and showing lines of paler scalp. Mrs. Pradip has been at him to get it repl
anted, but Sanjay has been very busy.
‘This is where real power resides, with us who run the Union every day. Not with feckless politicians who come and go with each sexennial vote. The last thing democracy needs is to be more responsive to the people. The people are idiotic and they choose idiots just like them. Their proper role is to toss out the idiots they chose last time, cap corruption by recycling the corrupt.’
It’s a recurring complaint, one of his favorites. He likes to say to Mrs. Pradip, “elected government is no way to run a democracy.” He always advises fresh, junior civil servants newly assigned to his department at CIS: “Politicians never lie so much as after a white bear hunt on Nunavut, before an election, or during a war.” He read that someplace, or heard it repeated by a graduate of Kars Academy. Or something like that. It only matters that it elevates bureaucrats.
Admiral Gaétan Maçon is no fan. Sanjay has been blocking his readiness programs any chance he gets, despite the building crisis with the Imperium. He once complained to Georges Briand, “that little man is like a Euclidean point. He occupies a position but has no parts and is all flatness.” Not an original witticism either, but it fits Sanjay Pradip like a manicure glove.
A confident and meticulous man, for nearly three decades Sanjay has arrived each work day morning at precisely 3:00 Universal Standard Time, without fail. He admires the rigor and regularity of UST. Not that he spends 100 seconds of each minute working, or all ten hours in a Standard Day. Of course not. He paces himself. He has tea. Yet he proudly puts in a full shift of 3.5 USH. This time of year, that schedule means he hyperloops home well before sunset. It’s one of his small joys that UST just happens to sync with the periodicity of Caspia’s diurnal rotation. More or less. Every 11 years clock masters point to a mildly disturbed analemma of the planet’s “Equation of Time” and insist on a 1.3 second reset. The minor variation always bothers Sanjay for a day or two, but then he magnanimously adjusts. Mrs. Pradip has a harder time with it.
He believes that Caspia is rarely fortunate in adopting UST for planetside use. “It’s good to be precise,” he says whenever asked his opinion, or just offers it. “Good to know the time of day and week and season to an atomic certainty. How else to run a sensible modern society? To carry out an orderly series of policies leading to benevolent outcomes and events? How else to know when it’s time for tea?” He believes in UST so deeply he wrote the official entry on clocks for the Historia Humana (Volume XV, Part XII g). He’s proud of it. It’s framed and on his wall.
Though he’s not happy about the four UST seasons or setting one USY at 400 days cut into 10 decimal months. It was a necessary response to rejection of a pure decimal alternative proposed by the Atomic Clock Association, a spectacularly stodgy group of picayune scientists and bureaucrats much like himself. Still, he had to cover the controversy in his article:
“Whilst it is more rational and thus preferable to adhere to the ACA proposed 1,000 day USY, a seasonal and annual break from decimal accounting was conceded to cultural traditions dating to the First Age of Exploration. Although some say the oddity dates farther back, to cradle world biases.”
That’s it. He covered it, as deserved. Enough said about that. Really? You want more? I suppose you’d also like some very hot tea while reading this next bit? Earl Gray or Darjeeling?
Reaction against the academic scheme was widespread and at times even violent. People hated that the new calendar meant celebrating birthdays and traditional festivals only once each 1,000 days. Religious groups were especially incensed at the wipe-out of all their high holy days. Four hundred days in a new Standard Year was agreed as a reasonable compromise from which people unreasonably refused to budge, in Sanjay’s view.
Several politically heavy-hitter worlds agreed on a 400-day year among themselves, and told the Atomic Clock Association and Bohr Merchant’s League to jump over an event horizon, and to stick their 1,000-day year up their … Well, that meant it was all over bar the elite, technocratic harrumphing. Today, the 400-day USY is the binding legal standard used in determining Final Age for purposes of extra-year fines and family inheritance.
Sanjay always starts his work day the same way. Reading overnights while sipping hot, aromatic tea from a thin china cup decorated with a finely flowered pattern. The ornate teacup and elaborate Toruń-teak table are his sole aesthetic indulgences in an otherwise spartan office on the 79th floor, midway up the sixth MoD tower. It’s notable, therefore, that each morning for the past 22 days he arrived a half-hour early. Today, he stepped out of the hyperloop into the MoD maglev elevator, thence up to his office, a full fifty minutes before the third hour struck!
He thinks it’s the least he can do, what with a war scare gripping MoD and the city. He noticed that senior people were coming in earlier and decided prudence dictated that he must do so as well. “Who is Ms. Prudence?” Mrs. Pradip asked him when he told her his decision.
He isn’t personally worried. He just thinks it’s useful to send a signal of solidarity with show-off politicians from time-to-time, his nominal superiors whom he otherwise hardly listens to or consults. He doesn’t give a fig about “the folks,” as the worst sort of populists in the Lok Sabha on Kars call the ill-informed fools who vote for them “as regular as rain on Oceanus.”
He sniffs as he takes a sip of tea that’s as tepid as his mood. ‘Most citizens can’t tell a field report from a policy paper, and don’t care about either. Look at the dreadful people they keep electing! They don’t know who really keeps them safe. Not the politicians! Oh well, fame is for fools. I’m a humble public servant, happy to do my bit.’ On some days he almost believes it.
War is in the air, so today he’s skipping the overnights to go straight to the field agent reports. Even he’s forced to admit that the Grün Imperium is shifting to open hostility toward the Calmar Union in its memex and neb broadcasts. ‘Of course, they don’t mean what their military nebs are saying. They can’t possibly want war, not with us. What do they stand to gain by war?’
He believes in peace, after failure of diplomatic talks that look to have been a cunning Grün distraction all along. After the Bad Camberg “incident” and invasion of Krevo rattle the Hornet’s Nest and stun the Joint Cabinet. Even with reserves mobilizing and training accelerated for all call-ups, with fleets assembling and warships patrolling the edge of the Imperium-Calmari frontier. He believes in the Golden Parchments and the durability of the Peace of Orion.
Well, maybe someone should. Who knows what to do in the middle of an unfolding crisis pregnant with the chance of war? Maybe we need people like Sanjay Pradip in his position.
After 29 years at CIS Sanjay is regarded by his superiors as “very good indeed at his job. Not brilliant, but most dependable.” So of course, rather than leave him in a middling position where he could hurt no one except perhaps the tea lady, and he would never do that, they bumped him just a little higher every year until today he’s the chief political analyst at CIS, responsible for running and ruining a critical department at a critical time. Then they confirmed the error with life-tenure and worst of all, an award for a lifetime of public service filled with humbug praise. That’s framed and on his wall, too. It hangs over a desk from which he can do grave and lasting damage to the Calmar Union.
Not from malice. He’s not a malicious man. Well, on his best days he not. It’s worse than that. He’ll wreck things out of small-minded sincerity and teacup-content incompetence. It’s the way of big bureaucracies, only more so nearer the top. Mediocrity rises while genuine talent is pushed out as too threatening to established shibboleths, to stalagmites of old-boy tradition and wait-your-turn seniority. “She’s not a team player, don’t you know?” Or “he’s not the right sort, just not one of us.” So out-the-door goes the young innovative thinker, the trenchant older critic and the natural-born intelligent dissenter.
The problem is, Sanjay Pradip is the right sort, especially trusted to give his best advice only after considering a
ll available facts. That’s why he’s systematically reviewing every CIS agent file on the Imperium compiled over the prior two years. Every file, including a primer on the Grün capital world. He settles into a deep padded chair with a recent field report on Kestino, anticipating listening to an especially sultry agent voice reporting covertly from the Grün capital of Novaya Uda. He forgets that his Darjeeling black is cooled and takes another sip. He grimaces as the cold tea crosses his lips, sets it down and lightly taps the teacup, telling it to bloody hurry and warm itself up. It’s delighted to comply. It also hates when the tea gets cold.
***
“Agent code: Lasalle Five. Confirmation code: Echo two-seven bravo. Report: Kestino.” The agent’s soft, conspiratorial accent is quite unplaceable, her voice distinctly, even arousingly female. Sultry, sensuous, and anonymous. At least that’s how she sounds to Sanjay Pradip. Any other listener would describe her narration as strictly professional, maybe even dry.
The vocals sync to visuals of a Class A world, rolling up from a small holo parchment that’s meticulously smoothed over Sanjay’s wooden desktop in a small alcove in his big office. A rotating blue-green planetary ball arcs out of the graphene-scroll, playing back under authority of his Core Secret codename. His security cubicle is inside a glass-walled office that’s already electronically and DNA buffered inside the already totally secure sixth MoD tower.