Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever (24 page)

For reasons never entirely clear, every nuclear power station on the island had been surrounded by nukes.

England was gone; Scotland south of the Highlands and Wales lower than Snowdonia were gone.
All despite the Peoples Republic of Scotland and the Welsh DMZ having no nuclear weapons of their own at all.

Ireland and most of the west coast of Continental Europe were left dying under clouds of radioactive dust.

The US blamed the insurgents in Snowdonia in general, and my mum and dad in particular, for the attack.

I was treated with the best care available in a hospital in Russia, a very public symbol of mercy by the US. Meanwhile, Snowdonia was carpet-
bombed,
the first real attempt to root out what had previously been a convenient and weak adversary.

This was the trigger for the far more terrible Event #2 — indisputably insurgent devised.

~~~

DNV informed my parents who, irritated at being dragged away from designing the garden maze accommodation of Drum #5, dragged me into the house conference room.

“Do not fuck this up.
Fail and no space on ship.”

Mum’s hair always seemed to stand on end when she was angry, as though it were carrying an electrical charge. I began to idly calculate how much charge would be required.

“What if I don’t want to go on your stupid ship?”

I knew the answer, of course. I was just being petulant.

“Then you die within 1000 years, along with the rest of us. The ecosystem is becoming shallow. There’s no buffering anymore. When it crashes, anti-senescence drugs will be of no use.”

I knew the obvious arguments. “You go then,” I said.

“I wish we could, son. We’re too old.” As so often, my father got the last, slowly fading word.

~~~

Everyone knows who we are, everyone knows we’re up to something, everyone knows our abilities.
We haven’t done anything but conspire, and that’s not currently against the rules in our Nomic-driven legal system.

Still, we’re frozen out of everything important. Those of us who had been part of the movers-and-shakers now find ourselves ostracized at their carefully casual lunches. Our data flows are crudely monitored.

Twelve against 188.
We’ve planned for this.

~~~

A single dog escaped the fire-bombing of North Wales. A golden retriever as far as anyone could tell
,
it got as far as the ruins of Liverpool where radiation killed it. That was far enough.

The virus it carried interacted with adapted harmless gut bacteria released into the wild years before. The resulting airborne virus infected, and proved extremely virulent in, primates.

Soft-hearted US servicemen fed the dogs and returned home at the end of their rotations carrying a virus with an incubation period of 18 months and a fatality rate of 75 percent.

The rate of increase of global population began to fall six months after the dog escaped. The total population of the US began to fall at the same time.

The US lost five million people before the vaccine was perfected; it became a military dictatorship in order to survive.

I proved to be immune to the virus.

~~~

After rehab I returned to my studies with a little more enthusiasm than before and cut back on the drugs.

I soon got back my usual stratospheric grades and DNV, using some arcane, trade secret, adolescent behavior metric, gave me a six-month recertification.

All was good.
Even my parents’ marriage.

“It works better when we’re together and we’re going to be working as a team for a very long time.”

“And when the ship leaves?” I asked.

“We’ll still be working on improvements and fixes to send on for centuries, if we live that long.”

I could tell Father
felt
the conversation was over and that I should leave his office.

Other than the cluttered bookshelf, it was clinical in there, all white with Virtuals — with their slightly off look when projected — everywhere.

“Why did you adopt me?” I asked, the question coming out of nowhere.

“You needed to be safe. You were all over the news and everybody wanted you dead. So we adopted you; that gave you EU citizenship to protect you from the US and her clients. Plus, that turned news coverage to cute and cuddly and away from son of mass murderers.”

“And what was in it for you?”

He hesitated, looking at the projected artworks around the room. I realised he was looking for something to hang a lesson on. Not finding it, he was forced to come clean.

“You filled the gap between us.”

~~~

“Stoney, do you think it’s too soon?”

“It was always going to be too fucking soon. I wish I’d never come.”

He speaks as though he were talking about a school trip.

Perhaps for him it was, raised as he’d been from birth to to be an engineer on the ship.
Provided as he’d been with the modifications necessary for ship engineer, plus ones for sunny optimism.

Now, Unity controls the engines and his optimism circuits have burned out.

“It’s too late to back out now. It’s begun.”

The vast amount of now redundant code contains about 0.005% extra code. Foreseeing this, I had forced my parents to infiltrate an adaptive virus. It was left untouched through three millennia on the general principle that no one screws with working code.

~~~

For a time I was a media darling, especially the US media which loved the symbolism surrounding
me.
I was even presented with US citizenship by the First Husband.
A poisoned gift in a Europe moving steadily towards virulent anti-US feeling once again.

Then
came
the virus, then the media backlash. Nine years old and lost in the gale of rage at my mum and dad.

I relied more and more on my paranoid nurse from Carlisle. It was she who told me, “When the US found out that England was providing arms to Western Sahara, undermining it in its Northern Africa wars, the US invaded.”

It had the pleasing rhythm of a bedtime story. The dreamlike feel of one as well.

All the bodies were buried under a comforting layer of words.

One day the nano sheet came loose and the doctors said I was as healed as I could be. They showed me my ruined back and said it was a miracle of modern medicine that I was alive, let alone with skin on my back.

They threw me in front of the media who assumed that my tears were of gratitude.

The next day a Scotsman and a Russian woman appeared in front of me. “We would like to adopt you. We would like to be your mummy and daddy, my darling. Would you like that?”

Father smiling blandly.
The cameras blindly watching.

It was the first and only time she called me
darling
.

~~~

I held, via Mother and Father, Russian, Scottish and EU citizenships. Courtesy of the First Husband, last seen hanging from a lamp-post near the Whitehouse, I had US citizenship.

I was also part of the very small group with English citizenship, a potentially lethal affiliation, and one that caused problems during the crew selection process.

The bureaucracy functioned as it should and defaulted to whichever flag fit the system best.

People were a different matter.

I stubbornly insisted on wearing a badge with St. George’s cross on it. The little splotch of red and white tended to produce a cascade of reactions.

First, horror that someone would wear such a symbol.

Second, horror at finding out where I was from.

Finally, a strange mix of horror, sympathy and anger on my explaining who I was.

I made the crew, of course. With my connections and skillset there was no doubt I would. In true Ageless fashion, training was scheduled to take the rest of the construction and fueling phases of Unity. That was about twenty years.

We all held down high-powered jobs during this time, too. Immortal, heavily modified overachievers need plenty of outlets.

~~~

Subverting the human accessible parts of the system was the easy part.

Now we need to, in Virtual design jargon, build our project, understand our project, memorise our project.

Building is proceeding at a satisfying pace.

The 188 who refused to join us are corralled in a large blank room and left to get bored.

The twelve conspirators are engineers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, Virtual designers and
myself
, a monad analyst. I moonlight as a numismatist, though.

After we reveal our true purpose to the 188, we gain a few recruits including, crucially, a semiotician, along for the ride in case the Unity encountered any alien symbol sets.

“Why didn’t you ask me earlier? I would have joined willingly.”

“We wanted to keep our numbers to a minimum. You’ll be working on the deep symbolism of the structure. The team includes two Virtual designers and an architect. There’s a parallel Real team consisting of engineers and another architect.”

“Is all that design firepower really needed?”

“It’s the largest thing ever made. If we don’t get any more recruits we’ll have to start training in secondary specialties. That could take decades and I want at least a skeleton of this thing out there inside five years.”

~~~

The pre-launch parties were dull, formal affairs. The ones on the ship were worse — expensive wine and food, stilted conversation, billionaire crew sneering at guests worth mere hundreds of millions.

Launch itself was fairly spectacular. An antimatter Orion drive with AM bombs exploding against a giant kickplate to provide smooth 1g acceleration.

~~~

Now that the team’s highly skilled brain map analyst has installed and activated my leadership modifications, I’ve become more confident, I smile more often, and I see people in simpler terms than before, as components in a larger structure.

I’m one of the few who still rest at night, an hour of sleep improving my thinking the next day. It also allows me, for a few moments, to drop the itchy, eyes-too-wide leadership pose.

I’ve also been able to return to my twin loves of monad analysis — a very arcane study of the small-scale interface between Virtual and Real — and numismatics, the study of the mathematics of coins, the latest theorized objects believed to underpin space-time.

Coins of all shapes, sizes, orientation and spin fill space, their edges representing a
very
localised entropy measurement. Every coin is unique and distinct — or rather, their relations between each other are, coins themselves not existing except within these relations.

And yet, for all that coins are distinct and unique, they all map continuously onto each other.

~~~

Centuries into the voyage we conspirators met for the first time on the ship. It was our last chance to stop the program.

I’d guilted Mother and Father into installing the dog virus during construction.

“Short of a block-by-block deconstruction it’s invisible,” Aileen, a software engineer, assured us.

“The skeleton is built in Virtual,” I said. “Filling it out will be by far the bigger job. I’m going to need a semiotician, someone to deal with the deep symbolic structure of this thing. People won’t be able to use it if they don’t believe in it, so we need a usable symbol set, only this one needs to be larger and run deeper that anything built before. Actually, a Jungian analyst might be more useful.”

“No more weird specializations. Someone learning that would definitely attract attention. Joanne?”

Our nano specialist told us that one-third of the ship’s mass, when converted to nano, would be enough. No one liked to think too hard about what that level of conversion would look like.

Every one of the twelve agreed to continue with the plan. This was easy to do when it was still a game, before time and distance could only be overcome by converting Unity into a lump of glittering clay.

~~~

The teams gradually grow larger and Unity lends us computing resources, a sure sign of its approval.
Progress is slow with each of us having to learn new specialisations. Our parents, generalists all, would despise us.

Small clouds of smart dust are released aft, dying in milliseconds, abraded by the gas and dust clouds. More complex and tougher dust is launched and lasts long enough to reproduce.

New dust that forms light-mediated links is launched. These links form distributed computing networks, which allow the rapid computations needed to form and maintain chains and nets.