Orcuin gaped at his words - or it might have been a reflex.
“Internity is the place where human seed fuses with yobibytes
[26] of data storage. It's a smart, infinite storage space on the Cloud, to which a continuous upload stream of people's memories will be directed. I'm getting excited just talking about it,” he confessed to the car's recording system. “If people can backup personal memories, there's no reason why we can't download them back to a new person, a clone of the dead body that will hold all the memories and knowledge of his previous life.
“Will I miss the past? I don't think so. Will I be excited by the future? More than words can say. When this recording is made public, I will already be in a better world.”
Adrenaline coursed through his veins. There, sitting in his airborne car, he realized the moment he had been waiting so long for had finally arrived.
The beauty of Internity, Christoph believed, lay in its automatic activation for every user whose life signs had stopped, signaling a new cycle of life to begin. In that instant, the person's clone would rise: a baby born into the world without a father or a mother, but with the practical knowledge of an ancient, eighty years times infinite incarnations. A brilliant application.
Christoph was now on his way to check up on the giant halls where the babies were kept, incubated like cocoons in transparent tanks. The best of the best were there, clones of all Minds founders and high ranked network users: “People worthy of eternal perseverance,” in his own eager words.
A smile crept to his face, and he made himself comfortable, stretching back in his seat. What a pleasure it was remembering the master plan he had concocted. He let the warmth of the sun take over, caressing his face. Everything was illuminated. Memories floated to the surface… his parents' faces. They never had faith in his investment. One day they would come around as well. They would love Internity. Who does not want to live forever?
“Where are they?” he wondered. “My parents are good people.” He cleared his throat to sound better on the recording. “I'm the one who didn't fight to stay in touch. When to let go and when to insist, this might be the hardest question of all. I haven't found an algorithm to solve that one yet, but the plan takes precedence. Sometimes I wonder what happened to them. But I admit that I haven't wondered enough. Not knowing gives me some comfort right now, when I don't suppose I could count on their support. They might be Neverminds in some remote country.”
Orcuin felt restless, and rested her head on the shoulder of the only person she ever really knew. Christoph remembered how he always told Fabian that, “Life is the most precious toy, and I will never let it go.” His parents never felt that Minds was a toy. They saw it as a boundless prank, despite their booming business on the network. His father once told him that he was nothing but a master of illusion.
“What's wrong with illusion?” Christoph asked. “Without Minds, life is less appealing.” His parents obviously knew nothing about Netopia or Internity. That's how it is with new ideas: people are intimidated by them and despise them, dumbfounded by a pathetic defensive reflex. Their immediate reaction is to calculate if and how it will hurt them, until they finally give in and recognize the brilliance.
There are precious few people who dare to think differently, he contemplated, cruising up in the air.
People who have the courage to want more from this world. The silent lazy minded majority were not even compatible with independent thought, conditioned as they were to always search for societal affirmation and worry about what people will say.
These thoughts were negative and not constructive. Christoph gave them several more seconds, and went back to savoring his eternal plan, where the decaying body - the human hardware - became secondary and dispensable, while the soul – the software – was preserved.
He had the stupidity of other people to thank for coming so far as to reach Internity, a promise soon to be realized. The digital vampires, as he liked calling them, were going to radically change what a human is, sucking on eternity for generations to come.
The neocar was preparing to land at the heart of his life's work. He had taken this approach path so many times, and every single time, he was astounded. It was the ultimate form of masturbation. A tingling thrill climbed from the tip of his toes up to his brain. With nothing behind to return to, he could only look forward. Christoph studied the sky ahead of him. He hadn't noticed it before, but the rays of sun that gently caressed his face and glowed over the ocean had disappeared into big, gray clouds.
The light was gone, and he was diving into a growing darkness. A storm was gathering. Orcuin yelped as lightening ruptured the air in a sudden fury. The neocar spun out of control, but Christoph sat there, calm, and surrendered to the vertigo. Fierce winds beat the windows, but he imagined them to be novel orchestral sounds. He was hit by a massive headache, drums pounding and cymbals crashing inside his skull, but he only smiled and pulled Orcuin closer, holding her tight.
“Don't worry, did I ever let you down?” he said to soothe her.
The neocar began to spiral down quickly. Warning alarms went off, and every button blinked.
“Remember, there's more than one life! We'll always shine on!” he shouted and broke out in a rolling laughter, rocking from side to side. His brain was filled with bits of memories. What does a person think of in a moment like this? he had often wondered from a place of safety. What would a worthy thought be? How do you choose the most important thing out of years of living?
And then Fabian's eyes came to his mind, with a yearning for tomorrow. Despite the turbulence and noise, a perfect tranquility descended on him. In his heart he knew that even if the neocar crashed on the mountainside, and crushed his delicate bones to dust, everything would be as it was. A younger version of Christoph would find its way back to prominence and continue where he left off. There was one thing he was sure of: dying did not seem like the end of the world.
Acknowledgements
Yasmine Levi: I want to thank my Dad, David Levi, who always believed and supported me. I dedicate the book to my beloved Mom, Bracha Neeman, who passed away in 2004 and left me with hopes and purple dreams, as her favorite color. Don't miss tomorrow, we shall meet again.
Gal Mor: I dedicate this book to my mother and father, Gad and Bilha Mor, for their love and support, and to my daughter Ori, the light in my life.
We want to thank Avi Tell, "Lazy" Oren and the Headstart Company, whose combined generous support made the publication of this book possible.
More thanks are due to our translator, Joaf Kleingeld, for his great work, patience and precision; to our 363 friends and supporters who made it possible for Netopia to be translated; to Pini Askal, Tamar Levin and Natti Baron for their brilliant comments and constructive criticism, and last - but far from least - Dov and Taly Eichenwald who believed in us from the very start, and without whose help Netopia would have forever remained in the darkness of the Neverminds.
Remarks
* * *
[1] The cost of using Minds resources was balanced against services purchased from the user by other network users. Very lucrative users would be paid by Minds at the end of each month.
[2] A personalized weather application. The Minds Digital Multisphere was a controlled and user-customized climate management system.
[3] A 3D printer manufactured by the Dream Maker Company. The smaller of the line produced edibles by scanning a photograph or a recipe, and the bigger ones could even produce buildings and street decorations.
[4] A paid parenting service helping to alleviate the burden of parenting from clients and taking over their child's education. This included telling bedtime stories, and monitoring their mental development. At first these services were rendered by humans, which were gradually replaced by intelligent holographic avatars.
[5] Tubes linking adjacent houses that were used to quickly transfer items unavailable from the Dream Maker.
[6] A web based record of a perso
n's entire range of mental and physical activity, which is saved on a personal Cloud and exposed by court order only when necessary.
[7] A condition endemic to the age of information singularity, where the accelerated transmission of data affected thought processes to the point of generating mental illnesses which were previously unknown.
[8] The global virtual currency, and the first that was not minted or printed and existed only through electronic transfers.
[9] A beer substitute that compensated drinkers for its poor taste with a unique experience: electrolytes chemically designed to optimize neurotransmission produced a temporary upwards shift in self-confidence, and without the negative side effects that came with regular alcohol consumption.
[10] A healthy alcohol substitute that contained nano-bots, robots with a size not exceeding several nano-meters. Once in the body, the bots proceeded with routine rudimentary checks and treatments, which most often included arteriosclerosis prevention.
[11] Every online user was given a grade which was determined by an algorithm that measured health status, mental status, social skills, and intellect. Below a certain threshold, the user is no longer considered an efficient part of the system, making him unnecessary.
[12] A digital surface used mostly for scanning small objects and copying them in nano-gel, which could also be used for scanning and analyzing liquids.
[13] Since society had become increasingly intolerant of the use of models to promote an impossible ideal of beauty, the fashion industry began rebranding their models as ‘health models’ who promoted a healthy life, and even set a minimum weight limit for models.
[14] A high official in charge of putting community laws into effect after they had been passed by a majority raising of hands at the Online People's Council assembly.
[15] The Turing Law protected the basic rights of people who were not connected to the internet. The dwindling of offline services created a need for the law.
[16] Those who followed a person's every online thought.
[17] A round, padded and safe device used to physically secure Minds users at home as they were exploring three dimensional worlds in their heads.
[18] A Minds command that allowed a user to be invisible to other users, and deny them access to shared thoughts.
[19] The new breed of dietetic foods were based on quantic dots that ‘digested’ and excreted the food before it could be absorbed by the body, so people could indulge without gaining weight.
[20] A medical center of dubious legality that provided Minds users who tired of the world a way to disconnect and live as Neverminds.
[21] A process that returned users and their memories to their pre-Minds state.
[22] A very sophisticated chip that held a technology protected by dozens of registered patents, the product of billions of dollars’ worth of research and development. The chip was implanted into the brain and synched with the neural lattice, then used as an expansion backup to organic memory; it was also uploaded to the net every day and stored on the personal profile on Minds. This was the chip that took over whenever a user could not remember a certain detail, and pulled it off the online databases.
[23] Time broker – a person who deals with the ongoing schedule maintenance for wealthy people for a cash retainer or other forms of payment or exchange.
[24] Vegetarian meat was a marketing term for lab grown meat stem-cells. The slaughtering of animals for food had dropped to nearly nothing, and ironically, as a result, the population of cattle and poultry on the planet also diminished in similar proportions.
[25] A business unit whose official role was to enhance and improve the world with a digital layer of ornamental plants and virtual creatures, and to splash colors to make Minds users happy.
[26] One yobibyte equals 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes, or 1,024 zebibytes.
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