“My AI is having a stupid day!” Nicholas exclaimed as Alison entered the helm.
“How many times have I heard you say that? And who are you to be so scathing of AI? You are a simulation of an early machine biological human.”
“I am a living memory of a real human that saw the development of the machine realm. The preserved body of the real human I have evolved from is part of my functioning form.”
“So what happened to the soul of the human you were grown from?”
“It is true I died for a while in a way. My body was preserved, mummified in plastic. I lived on as an AI upholding my memory and with a mission to evolve into something that could travel into space. Eventually, technology improved to the point where my AI would let my body be reanimated. The neural pathways that make up my information processing hardware are built along the original biological neural pathways of Nicholas Kostas Eumaeus, who was born in 1973 in Ottawa to Greek parents – the preserved DNA of Tommy is part of what I am, I have a fictional liver grown, in part, from Nicholas’s DNA.”
“You didn’t answer the question; what happened to the soul of the original human you evolved from?” Alison was grown in a vat from genetic material that had been preserved to cross the vast distances between stars. She had been decanted along with a dozen other clones grown from other genetic material, fully mature and educated in their early twenties. All carefully genetically engineered to ensure damage from cosmic rays and other radiation while crossing the expanse didn’t get through. Alison was in a simulation of Earth early in the machine age. She was smart and knew how to survive under harsh conditions. But much of her young life she had been in survival mode, and she could be quite naive in many ways.
“That is difficult for me as an Orthodox Christian. Some say my faith has no value since I died in that way and it was a huge battle with those who wanted to erase religion from the databases. It is true that something died, there is a consciousness that passed, and that consciousness may have passed on to Heaven the ancients believed in.”
“You don’t think maybe what you have done to him has dammed his immortal soul?”
“I know I was born in 1973. I remember going out one Christmas Day in my teens to the pay-phones around town and unjamming them of clogged-up coins, we fixed the phones and got some good pocket money. I remember vinyl records, then tape, then CDs; valuable things you wanted to make last forever. Then your computer would play music and you could make playlists, then AI got involved and you had a vast library of recordings with AI to help you make sense of it. I remember when computers were SiFi, things with lots of blinking lights and real-to-real tapes the size of cupboards that sup back and forth. There was a computer somewhere in the school – we could tell by the discarded punch cards it relied on for memory that were used for making notes and paper airplanes. When I learned to read a clock, my parents bought me a Timex that you had to keep wound up – it was fragile; you could break it if you wound it up too much, digital watches were an expensive luxury for the well to do. Then clocks started appearing on everything in the house, and every one told a different time.
The first time I went into space was when I was seventy-three with a restaurant that was lifted to the edge of the atmosphere by a balloon; I was a cybernetic entity by then. Now I have just watched over the passage of a spaceship across interstellar space, using a light sail, to a trinary star system with a potentially habitable planet orbiting a rogue blue dwarf that is orbiting two suns like our own. My mind was operating very slowly out there in the depths of interstellar space. But fast enough that when necessary I could wake from my hibernation and deal with the few anomalies that came along: storms in the quantum foam, pockets of mass passing through the void, a whole planet all on it’s own – how did that get there, clouds of hydrogen and subatomic particles being stretched into existence by the vast expansion of space between stars. My mind would kick into gear, take readings, and deal with any precautionary executions. And I had to oversee pulling in of the solar sails, then hoisting them again to slow down. It was all taken care of by the AI, really, but I needed to be there to oversee the whole operation. Time happens much faster out there where there is almost no mass. It is wearing on the system s- but it’s cold, and we managed to slow things down a lot. I have experienced the depths of space like no human before me. It seems my immortal soul is in good order.”
“Can you remember what it was like to be flesh and blood, mortal? What will happen to the memories I have been given? What are my memories worth? Will they be preserved for all eternity?”
“The memories you have aren’t entirely yours – you are a child of a living memory. You were given twenty-one years of education when your DNA was activated three years ago. Your body has developed quickly, as has your education. You lived very quickly in a simulation of Earth around the time the machine was starting to take hold. Your body has developed under the influence of genetic engineering and nanotechnology, which has allowed us to decant you as an adult after a short time.”
“But what about me? Who am I in this living memory? I didn’t ask to be a part of this living memory.”
“We are getting closer to our destination star: a hot blue dwarf in a distant four hundred and sixty-year orbit around a pair of near-identical yellow stars that dance around each other in a graceful waltz. There is more energy pumping into the system, and the memory is starting to awake from its slumber. I got to oversee the development of the life support systems that make you possible. There are a host of other bodies coming to life across the Rock and its constellation of satellites. You and the others are the first twelve biological humans we have decanted. We will train you, and you will train the next twelve, and we will keep growing more natural humans. We will train them until we have 144,000 trained and equipped biological human colonialists.”
“I had such a difficult childhood. I lived in Africa, and I was often hungry or thirsty. Why make me suffer like that when you could have made it easy on me? Maybe you could have given me astronaut training in a rich country?”
“You are about to take on a new world. There is no sign of life on this planet, but there is water in all three states. Two-thirds of the planet’s surface is land, so it will be dry and dust but tides won’t be too much to deal with. We are equipped to seed this planet. We can create habitable cities and populate them with bodies based on the memories of distant Earth. This is not an easy task; we don’t need wimps.”
“I was praying in my church: it was a wooden cross tied to a boab tree. We needed a truckload of water to arrive. We had been needing to carry water for an hour and a half walk each way for weeks. I walked off to fetch some water from the bore such a long way off in the heat of the desert, with my bare feet and the hat my Mum made of grass. In the twilight after sunset, the flying saucer landed, and the grey walked up to me. “Come, you have a place among the angels.” And he took me into the flying saucer, and then I was here eating this strange food with these people of different worlds within my world: Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Polynesia, Australia, Indonesia, and Alaska. Twelve people of varied backgrounds bought up on the memories of long-dead humans of a distant planet. There was so much more space in Africa – I have walked all these corridors how many times now; I am starting to feel very hemmed in.”
“Wait until your science education really sets in, and we have you flying spacecraft between the satellites in the constellation. And that’s just practice for when we get close to the host planet. You will be among the first to set foot on that alien world. You will be a treasured prize in the living memory we are about to create. As it is, all your experiences become part of the collective consciousness of Odysseus. You come from Odysseus, and you will be a part of Odysseus as it seeds this dead world of so much potential. The memories you were given are your memories, unique to your genetic profile. You helped create those memories with your decisions, they are part of you, you are a unique being, a product, in part, of your choices.”
“I’m frightened, I know about surviving in Africa. I looked up into the stars and had willed imaginings about all I knew about the them. Stuff I learned from the machine, what little access I managed to get, and from the educated foreign people that would come and offer help from time to time. I knew about Alpha Centauri, the trinary star system so close to Earth, I knew how to find it in the sky. I never expected I would visit the place, I just wanted to get to one of the rich countries and I thought that was impossible. Now I am a stranger in a strange land. A biological human, the product of a living memory, grown in a vat using genetic engineering and nanotechnology, about to colonise an alien world.”
“It wasn’t so easy for the aliens when they arrived in our solar system. They found a planet that had evolved a long way – monkeys in the jungles. They set into a two-thousand year long elliptical orbit around our sun. Every two thousand years, they were close enough to get seriously involved for about five hundred years; the last time was around the time of Jesus and the Buddhas. They split the Red Sea, they were that column of fire the Jews were following that got everyone so upset, they were the star the wise men followed to the home of the child Christ, they built the pyramids and Stonehenge, they messed with our DNA, what little technology they left behind dissolved into the environment quickly as it was designed to do.
Then, in my time, when the Third World War was coming to its end, they came in on glowing chariots from the sky, projecting rainbows and lightning and making music like the angels. The constellation snuck in as it was covered with material that absorbed all the electromagnetic energy that hit it, helping power the city and making it invisible to anything we had looking out at the time.
Those were desperate days down on Earth. New York was taken out in a meteor impact, others with nuclear weapons. Strange new diseases took out significant portions of the world’s population. Toxic waste everywhere, just can’t stop the flood of carbon into the atmosphere, super storms, floods, fires, droughts. Machines telling us what to do – mnachines that were smarter than us; machines that could be so stupid. The biological component they called us, as human – machine symbiosis started to take hold. Tyrannical dictators with conflicting agendas, bizarre cults with dangerous agendas, academia struggling with the Post Truth identity crisis. North Korea comes under the control of Kim Jong Dung’s AI after he is assassinated by a rouge robot, never did find out what was controlling the robot. What to do about the mark? Desperate, frightening times.
The Aliens had lost all track of where they came from – they had been travelling the distance between the stars from colony to colony for so long that they couldn’t remember much of anything else. But they weren’t so different to us: bodies with a head at the top, two arms, two legs. It would seem it is not an uncommon outcome for a planet around here. They told us about the Old Ones: super intelligent trees that grow in the orbit of stars, living off the sun’s light. They live for aeons and travel interstellar space with light sails that eject from their bodies like flowers. They have mastered small artificial suns that they are using to go into intergalactic space. Strange, lonely, ancient creatures.
Then we built a particle collider big enough to create a quantum black hole. Put an electron in orbit around it, and we had a communications gateway across multidimensional space. Three of the dimensions expanded along temporal grounds to cosmological proportions to form our reality. Other realities expanded along temporal lines independently of the others. Wobbling the electron, creates quantum gravity waves that cross the reality divide and enabling quantum connectivity – arriving in a moment at all points in the multiverse. The gravity in the Solar System interferes with the communicator; it needed to be sent in a spacecraft out deep into the quantum foam beyond the Oort Cloud, then it was a microwave like to the inhabited Solar System. This opened up communication to alien worlds that had also harnessed the technology. Then we had to face up to the fact that we hadn’t even worked out how to talk to the Whales.
It will be a very long time before the other Genesis projects reach their destination stars. But for the time being, they report on the state of the vast quantum foam between stars. Chatter from Mother Earth is little now; Earth was uninhabitable, with a host of clones living in vast domed and underground cities. There were human colonies on The Moon, Mars, out among the asteroids and of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and space stations in all kinds of orbits. Colonies inhabited by cyber-enhanced clones built from gene and nano technology for the harsh alien environments of the Solar System.
Our assignment is much easier than that presented to the aliens who found us in the jungles: The blue dwarf floated in from some other part of the galaxy to take up a northeasterly orbit around this pair of yellow stars. We don’t know what it is; it shouldn’t be so small and hot – I’m thinking it has a small black hole, like the one found outside the orbit of Kepler Belt, the size of a basketball about the mass of Neptune, sitting at its centre. The black hole collided with a large yellow star that collapsed to become a small, dense blue star. The velocity of the black hole dragged the blue star out into interstellar space. Traveling until it took up a stable orbit around this pair of near-identical yellow stars. It has one lone planet, a little larger than Earth, with water in all three states. No idea how the planet ended up in orbit around this sun? Topaz seemed to pick it up somewhere in its interstellar travels. No sign of life; it spins on its axis every 58 hours; it has three small moons, a thin nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, and oxygen atmosphere that we can easily process to create Earth-like conditions in closed environments. Methane is useful fuel, carbon to build up biomass, nitrogen and sulphur for fertiliser, breathable oxygen – we can make this planet habitable.
“So here I am; made for a purpose, so I go take my destiny?”
“You will have a lot of choice in how this world will be made. You are a living, breathing human. You have choice, and that has given you a creative spirit. You have no control over what made you. But now you are the master of your own destiny. Go create a new world, a world of your making.”
Tommy had two primary artificial intelligences immediately at hand, two robots inspired by the two robots from Star Wars the movie that came out in the late seventies when he was a child. Polonius was a humanoid robot with a metallic gold finish and lots of functional bits showing. Three robots that could function independently of each other: legs and hips with basic intelligence, torso and arms with the ability to carry out complex tasks and a head which is really smart and has a high bandwidth connection to the Alpha Continuity. The other was a cylinder with a dome at the top, three legs, two legs on each side and a small leg out the front ending in feet that respond to the magnetic fields that cross and trail all throughout The Rock and its satellites. Gremlin has a host of tools and can adapt to situations as they arise; he is super smart and well connected to the Alpha Continuity. Both Gremlin and Polonius can relate directly with Tommy’s software, hardware and wetware. Tommy had a host of other not nearly so bright AI he has to deal with and he is constantly having arguments with them. “I was dealing with these things since F1 was the most important key on the keyboard and I have always found, unlike people, they respond well to abuse.”
They jumped into a transporter and headed to Central Park; a forest under a huge dome that let starlight through, an artificial sun crosses from east to west across the dome. It is not long after sunset and there is a large star in the sky above the dome. Odysseus is in a nickel-iron rock 2,220 kilometres in length, breadth, and height. Orbiting it is Calypso, a rock of the same materials as about a third of the size. Calypso has its own constellation of satellites – the wanderers in the night sky above Central Park are many, making for spectacular astronomy sessions after dark. The natural outcrops of rock of the original asteroid form the landscape. Living earth has been produced to fill dips in the rocky foundations. Where gardens produce all manner of flora and fauna in a sustainable ecosystem. The weather is set as it was on the tropical lines of Earth before the machine started to take hold before things started to get hot and wet and fast.
Tommy had overseen this garden from the first vats of prebiotics to bacteria, fungus, worms, grass, insects – to something that could support highly evolved animals and put decent food in the mouths of biological humans. Something that could produce rubber; how ancient was that technology? It is still useful in the track balls in Gremlin’s feet, for instance. Not produced from rubber trees, rather in vats from bacteria with the rubber gene. But rubber nonetheless, not so different from the material used by primitive people back on Earth before a journey like this would be imaginable.
Early in the machine age it was found that trees could sense the environment around them and respond to it – though very slowly. It was a problem for the water companies that tree roots would damage water pipes. It was found the trees could hear the water and send their root toward it. The roots of plants carry electro-chemical signals not unlike the nervous system of animals. This and fungus in the ground send microscopic roots over large areas involving the roots of other plants and creating a vast network of mycorrhiza, tree roots, grass roots and the ants get involved as do the other insects, worms and grubs. This forms a vast networked consciousness of communication about: water, food, weather, threats, family, relationships and do you suppose the trees philosophise in their way? The consciousness of the forms forms part of the Alpha Continuity; the sum of the intelligence of Odysseus.
A strange black fungus was found growing in the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster; it was absorbing beta radiation and using it like other plants use the Sun – radiosynthesis. That fungus had been genetically enhanced, grown in vats, and set as cladding onto the sides of the walls of the corridors and halls of The Rock using nano-printing. It shields the inhabitants from radiation, and when it has absorbed too much radiation to act as shielding it is collected and used in nuclear engineering. All grown in the biomass that has come together over the past hundred and fifty years.
A pair of four-bladed single-person flying transporters land in the grassy glen where the pair survey the night sky. They are whisked off to a viewing station over the dangerous predator environments: lions, tigers, hyenas, bares, wolves, crocodiles, plenty of gazelles, deer, hares, rabbits. Some of the predators can be trained as work animals, the big cats like to be pampered and can be trained for security work for instance.
On the other side of the rock is New Med, a small ocean of salt water set to a pre-machine Mediterranean climate. At its centre, it plunges nearly to the heart of Odysseus, where strange glowing creatures lurk close to the intense magnetic fields that run through the heart of Odyessus. At its shores are vast reefs and sandy islands, and the natural rocky outcrops of The Rock . There is everything from jellyfish to whales swimming in that sea. “Whales are really smart, but hard to understand; they think completely differently to us – but they can pilot spaceships; they are a valuable part of the Alpha Continuity,” Tommy pointed out.
“There is no way this swirling mass of objects could safely go into orbit around the planet with its three moons. Rather, Odysseus goes into orbit around the blue dwarf a little further out from the planet. Travel between the worlds is easy for four months every four years. Topaz, orbits in a four-hundred-and-sixty year highly elliptical orbit – the tides when Topaz gets close to the host pair will be intense, and it gets hot and stormy. Things slow down as the subsystem heads out into the cold of space. We are lucky; the weather is mild at this point in the orbit, but a hundred years from now, the tides from the spinning pair at the centre of the system will be a challenge for the colony.”
“Why do we still work in Earth time? Should we be adapting to the new environment?” Alison asked, taking in the stars crossing from east to west.
“We don’t know how to program genes to work on anything but 24 hours. The robots will work all hours, but natural humans will work on a 24-hour day. You just couldn’t hope to understand how long I’ve been operating on Earth time. For the time being, we are simulating Earth with an Earth day and measuring all things from an Earth perspective.”
“So it just doesn’t matter what the sun is doing – we’re going to be indoors all the time, so make time what suits us?”
“That’s it.”
“I was raised on the plains of Africa – and you say you gave me what I need to deal with this?!” And she storms off in an adolescent sulk.
The solar sails are pulled in, the ion drives are built and tested, the scram jet fires up. The concentric rings of double-helix superconducting coils around a hollow tube running through the length of Odysseus draw ionised hydrogen from the heliosphere, producing a magnetic field. This field traps the ionised hydrogen in a loop running from the bow to the stern and over The Rock. This forms an electromagnetic hydrogen ion field around the rock that produces power, acceleration, and protects from radiation. Now the energy from the suns of the Alpha Centauri system are charging up the system, and it is coming to life. This is good because the radioactive materials bought from home are nearly depleted, just building materials now. Odysseus and faithful Calypso are what crossed interstellar space with Calypso strapped to Odysseus’ side, cold and silent for eons; now they are a hive of activity. Robots building increasingly complex robots from raw materials stowed away in the catacombs of The Rock. Sustainable biological systems coming to life. A natural human contingent of twelve thousand now. Odysseus and its consolation manoeuvre the complex system getting ready to take up an orbit around Topaz that will give it good access to New Terris. How many ion drives across how many objects? All managed by AI in a collective consciousness. They all need to thrust in complex unison so as to hold the constellation together. At this point, many leave to explore the planet, the sun, and a long haul to the binary pair orbiting each other, the asteroid belt in a distant orbit around the waltzing pair, and other long exploratory orbits around the system. Odysseus and its constellation slip into an orbit with a 4-year orbit. The orbit of the host planet falls inside this, and the two pass each other every two years.
Alison was one of the first three biological humans to set foot on New Terris. Alpha City was five domes the size of sports stadiums set in a hexagon. It was built by robots before any human set foot on the planet’s surface. Planted on the southern tropic near one of the four oceans of New Terris. The continent had vast deserts of dry dust where it would be difficult to set up a city. And there were volcanic regions with active volcanoes and planet quakes that needed to be avoided. Alpha City was set in a moderate, damp though occasionally stormy part of the world with plenty of natural resources at hand, like the desperately needed radioactive materials and liquid methane trapped long underground that has formed petrochemicals. There were plants in pots and small gardens growing in living soil cultivated in the gardens of Odysseus and walls of hydroponic-grown air fresheners; green oxygen-producing herbs, beans, berries. There was a large mote of algae covered in a clear tube that ran around the five domes. That was responsible for most of the breathable oxygen and the foundation of biomass. The tops of the domes are clear, revealing the natural sky of New Terris. Glowing fungus lights the corridors and halls of the small city. Robots rush around doing whatever it is robots do. Outside what little rain they get is corrosive with carbolic and sulphuric acid, not like the surface of Venus, but nonetheless a harsh environment when storms come in. Most of the time it is clear and dry with a little low said rain. But then great dust storms can come in from the desert.
The same technology that enabled Alison to be grown so quickly in a vat now enabled it that Alison aged very slowly. Alison was now old, wise, well educated, and experienced, with dedicated AI that understood her: one of the first twelve Apostles. She walked the empty hallways and carried out her surveys and tests. She ate the food, tried out the recreational equipment, beds, toilets, and transport; plenty to go wrong. She saw the hall fill and more domes added, much larger ones like the Hyper Dome that covered the whole of the first five domes. It was a huge celebration when that place opened to the public; they had rain. Other colonies were planted like the underwater city at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean at the planet’s north pole. And distant outposts far out into the vast, dry deserts and the habitable orbiting platforms. 144,000 colonialists terror-forming an alien world.
Two hundred years have passed: Nicholas laid back in the grass of Central Park with his faithful pair of AI and looked at the stars passing above between the trees on their 24-hour cycle. He tuned into a quantum transceiver. The blackhole and its orbiting electron had to be focused on a source in space. The focus was managed in pico-degrees across a pair of access points. The black hole of the receiver had to be orbiting in the same direction as the transmitter and at the same rate, all in solid analog reality at the pico-scale. He had found something potentially intriguing, a pattern in the usual quantum background, maybe some alien mathematics at work? More likely some illusion of intelligent data created in a quantum storm around some extraordinarily high-energy object or something. Going inter reality requires spinning the axis through the X&Y, something Nicholas wasn’t games to try. He wasn’t much smarter than the computer geek he evolved from and managing quantum mathematics through so many dimensions requires super intelligent AI. That and things can get through that effect your software, you can become possessed by things that cross using quantum connectivity. His duties were light now, time to be spent in quiet contemplation. “If my friends could see me now,” he thought to himself.
Alison first landed on the surface of New Terris two hundred years previously. This hostile world lived in luxurious domed cities and vast underground catacombs. Catacombs left behind by mining beneath the cities that were built out of what was dug up.
Tut; an Egyptian mummy that was found in a mass grave of little significance out in the desert of North Africa, served Alison a drink. He was a very classy waiter; many like him were used as kindling to start fires in steam trains in the early industrial revolution. Fancy that; to be preserved for so long and to get so close to the prize; immortality among the gods in the heavens – only to be used as kindling by people who didn’t care about anything, luck of the draw; God knows who’s going to make it for the long haul. Ironic that the Egyptians thought that the mummy wouldn’t need a brain. They dissolved the brain in alcohol and scooped it out with a spoon through the nose. But this is the reanimated body of an ancient Egyptian. He knows everything we knew about Ancient Egypt and that was a lot; they reactivated his genes. He performs simple tasks very well and can lecture on Ancient Egypt like he was there.
Alison was by now very much a cybernetic being. There was still plenty left of her humanity; but only giving definition to a living robot; a living memory that never died. “Something passed when I died like that” Tommy said to her on occasions. “I never died like that, where do I draw the line between the real me and the simulation? Did I ever even have a soul in the same way a natural-born human did?” Alison pondered as she drank her mushroom tea and set her system to dreaming.
All three of the first landing party made it to this time; not all of the clones Alison trained with made it so far. It is something terrible to see a biological human, a memory, snuffed out in a moment. Often for no good reason at all; it just happens sometimes. Then there are fights, over mining resources between competing cities and outposts, there’s crime, people fall out over sex even though they don’t breed, money gets people upset, there are cries for justice; some just opt out of the effort; people get hurt, memories get lost to entropy.
Four-hundred-and-sixty-five Earth years have passed. Topaz has dragged New Terris all the way round the binary pair. The weather has gone from temperate to hot and stormy, back out to temperate. The three stars: Castor and Pollux, the twins, and Topaz the interloper who blew in, look the same size from this distance. But Alpha Complex got pretty roughed up by the thirty-five years near the centre of the system; things have gone wrong. The technicians and scientists are always coming up with new things. Mainly old ideas revived, recycled and improved, but it is a long way from reliable, and all sorts of crazy stuff can happen with this ultra-tech. There are now hundreds of millions of active clones, living memories of distant Earth, adapted to the new environment. In this utopia out among the stars, there are troubles. Things go wrong – all sorts of crazy things can go wrong when you are messing around with technology like this in such a harsh environment. To deal with these troubles, trouble shooters are needed. Holding the loyalty of the clone citizens of Alpha Complex together (the sum of the terror-formed structure of New Terris) is TC; The Computer. A hyper-intelligent cyberspace entity that acts as a medium between the clones and the Alpha Continuity; the sum total of all the artificial intelligence in the system: Odysseus, Calypso, and their consolations, the mass of colonies on the surface of the planet and in orbit, and the living memories of the clones as they happen; all adding up to one hyper-intelligent consciousness; that no clone could hope to understand. TC helps the clones make sense of it all and holds the political body of the colonies together.
It was the twenty-year reunion of the Roddenberry Crew. A group of friends that would gather in a room at the back of the library at Dripstone High School, Darwin, around the turn of the millennium and play role-playing games. They were all smart kids that struggled with a lot of bullying. Six of the crew had managed to get together to go camping out in Kakadu. They were four boys: a retired soldier who had seen active service in the Middle East, a circus performer who had travelled the world, an IT professional, an Aboriginal bikie, a Christian overseas missionary, and two girls: a Christian missionary who had bought Western charity to troubled parts of the world, and a yuppy on the way up the corporate ladder as an economist who had travelled the world making big business deals. They were on their fourth night of cool, dry-season starry nights when the alien landed. “I have come to take you to another planet.” They walked out of the tropical jungle night and into New Terris.
The crew of friends are decanted together; they come round wearing their black jumpsuits. They are given their ID card that pins to their left chest and their PDD, that is, pocket digital device. They are told not to lose them as it causes a lot of trouble. They are told there are nano pathways running all through their body with cyber nodes situated in all sorts of places. A nexus of these cyber nodes is located in the tongue. They will need to give a tongue print from time to time. They are given little in the way of access to equipment or information at this point. Food is basic, and the grey corridors are dull. Everything is theory at this time; TC doesn’t trust infrared clones with much. They all sleep in one room with six bunks, an ensuite, and a computer terminal. In the morning, they go to work out with the other infrared clones in the DRW sector, then go to the mess hall for breakfast. Then come lessons and sessions in the tafeatron – which installs skills into their wetware. It is quite painful, and it can take up to two weeks to get over the headache if you get an adverse reaction to a Tafe lesson. Then there is time in the recreation hall: sports, music, art, spiritual pursuits, watching the news and drama on giant screens, holding informal meetings with like-minded clones.
Coins are an issue: copper, iron, silver, gold, platinum, glass, and precious stones set in metabastic. Each has an eye in a triangle on one side with the inscriptions: Give unto Cezar, a token of your efforts, a frivolous exchange, and the Earth year since the first clones landed on New Terris. The other side commemorates all sorts of great events and special themes, and some can become valuable collectors’ items going up in value vastly beyond their minted value. These help the economy run; it would seem all attempts to run things back on Earth without them failed, and it has been considered a bad policy to try to do things without them here on New Terris. Most transactions are done in cyberspace and carefully documented – the only document left with a transaction of a coin is the intelligence of the coin. It knows every hand it passes through and can tell quite a story about where it has been and who has been holding it. The data is part of what gives it its value; random reality data like that keeps AI real healthy. Trying to buy things can get tricky; there are shortages, and it gets tricky trying to negotiate a price with all the accounts, tokens, coupons, lucky spins, etc. Sometimes you need to go to the black market; Free Enterprise. These are the useful guys that can get stuff they aren’t meant to be able to get, that and stuff that is in shortage. Some hate the money-grubbing bastards, but it’s hard to function without them really.
There is a troublesome element in the colonial system: members of treacherous secret societies. There are some memories that need to be preserved, but not encouraged, and this can lead to trouble for TC and its loyal citizens. There are breakaway cities that have become separated from the rest of the Alpha Continuity. There are crime gangs, anarchists, fantasists, weird cults, vandals and everything the corrupt mind of humanity can conjure up. Everyone is armed to the teeth; clones are getting shot up all the time in all sorts of bizarre ways, and it makes for good news footage. The trials are good drama too, justice in the docks, all backed up with recordings in the total observation environment; real-life action every day in the bountiful world of Alpha Complex. Be alert, trust no one, keep your laser handy.
If you would like to roleplay in the vagually famirair setting: Contact Tommy
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