by Jaym Gates
After the Fall
The Anthology of Transhuman Survival & Horror
Edited by Jaym Gates
Eclipse Phase
A Primer on Transhuman Survival
White Hempen Sleeves
Ken Li
How far will you go to experience the ultimate transhuman taboo? With enough wealth, longevity, and power, anything is possible, but the cost might be more than you can imagine.
Spiritus Ex Orcinus
Tiffany Trent
After one too many rebellions, a cetacean uplift has been resleeved into human form and enslaved to mind a pharma's deep-sea factories. She is on the verge of giving up hope when a legend steps out of the shadows and offers her a once in a universe opportunity: to find the last living Earth whale. It is everything she has dreamed of, but Earth is nothing like what it was, and dreams are sometimes deadly.
Into the White
Jack Graham
A murder most foul—and mysterious—in the tunnels of an abandoned Titan project. A planet full of suspects. A Firewall agent desperate for answers. But Titan technology isn’t without its own dangers.
The Thousandth Cycle
Fran Wilde
A wager between corporations, an ancient fable, and a secret mission collide, with two sisters caught square in the middle.
Interference
Nathaniel Dean with Davidson Cole
Transhumanity offers many new fields and frontiers of psychological research. Those willing to risk it all may find answers they never wanted.
The Fukuda Cube
Kim May
A routine salvage mission uncovers a love lost before the Fall, but it has been a long time, and people change. But missions have no mercy on lost loves.
Lack
Rob Boyle & Davidson Cole
A recovery mission to the wreckage of Earth brings the team face-to-face with the horrors of what was left behind, and the price some interests are willing to pay for knowledge.
Nostalgia
Georgina Kamsika
Not everyone clings to the outer frontiers of technology and transhumanism. Unlikely allies come together to protect the future from the past.
Nostrums
Jack Graham
Illegal uplift harvesting for traditional medicines, Yakuza, forgotten cults, and a very strange medicine keep Firewall agents and law enforcement chasing shadows.
Prix Fixe
Andrew Penn Romine
Some people will do anything for a good meal.
An Infinite Horizon
Steven Mohan, Jr.
A world has blipped out of communication, and a crack team has been dispatched to find out why. The beautiful planet that awaits them gives no hint of the horror it hides.
Stray Thoughts
F. Wesley Schneider
A collective has misplaced one of its members, and turns to a PI to recover him. What looks like a straightforward job quickly devolves into a messy question of free will, belonging, and legality.
Melt
Rob Boyle & Davidson Cole
Indentured slaves, the lowliest forms of life, pawns of the wealthy Venusian politicians high above, sustained only by their dreams of freedom. Is there anything for them beyond the mines, or are they doomed to be a cheap PR tool for their masters?
Thieving Magpie
Madeline Ashby
Everything, everyone, is a tool, if you know how to use it. Some are merely a little slower to figure out what they’re being used for.
A Resleeving of Love
Karin Lowachee
Idealism and cynicism clash head-to-head in an illegal operation.
Authors
Eclipse Phase
A Primer on Transhuman Survival
We humans have a special way of pulling ourselves up and kicking ourselves down at the same time. We’d achieved more progress than ever before, at the cost of wrecking our planet and destabilizing our own governments. But things were starting to look up.
With exponentially accelerating technologies, we reached out into the solar system, terraforming worlds and seeding new life. We reforged our bodies and minds, casting off sickness and death. We achieved immortality through the digitization of our minds, resleeving from one biological or synthetic body to the next at will. We uplifted animals and AIs to be our equals. We acquired the means to build anything we desired from the molecular level up, so that no one need want again.
Yet our race toward extinction was not slowed and in fact received a machine-assist over the precipice. Billions died as our technologies rapidly bloomed into something beyond control … further transforming humanity into something else, scattering us throughout the solar system, and re-igniting vicious conflicts. Nuclear strikes, biowarfare plagues, nanoswarms, mass uploads … a thousand horrors nearly wiped humanity from existence.
We still survive, divided into a patchwork of restrictive inner system hypercorp-backed oligarchies and outer system collectivist habitats, tribal networks, and new experimental societal models. We have spread to the outer reaches of the solar system and even gained footholds in the galaxy beyond. But we are no longer solely “human” … we have evolved into something simultaneously more and different—something transhuman.
—
Eclipse Phase is a post-apocalyptic setting of transhuman survival and horror. Humans are enhanced and improved, but humanity is battered and bitterly divided. Technology allows the reshaping of bodies and minds and liberates us from material needs, but also creates opportunities for oppression and puts the capability for mass destruction in the hands of everyone. Many threats lurk in the devastated habitats of the Fall, dangers both familiar and alien.
What is Transhumanism?
Transhumanism is a term used synonymously to mean “human enhancement.” It is an international cultural and intellectual movement that endorses the use of science and technology to enhance the human condition, both mentally and physically. In support of this, transhumanism also embraces using emerging technologies to eliminate the undesirable elements of the human condition such as aging, disabilities, diseases, and involuntary death. Many transhumanists believe these technologies will be arriving in our near future at an exponentially accelerated pace and work to promote universal access and democratic control. In the long scheme of things, transhumanism can also be considered the transitional period between the current human condition and an entity so far advanced in capabilities (both physical and mental faculties) as to merit the label “posthuman.”
As a theme, transhumanism embraces heady questions. What defines human? What does it mean to defeat death? If minds are software, where do you draw the line with programming them? If machines and animals can also be raised to sapience, what are our responsibilities to them? If you can copy yourself, where does “you” end and someone new begin? What are the potentials of these technologies in terms of both oppressive control and liberation? How will these technologies change our societies, our cultures, and our lives?
Firewall
Firewall is a shadowy network dedicated to counteracting “existential risks”—threats to the existence of transhumanity. These risks include biowar plagues, nanotech swarm outbreaks, nuclear proliferation, terrorists with WMDs, net-breaking computer attacks, rogue AIs, alien encounters, and so on. Firewall isn’t content to simply counteract these threats as they arise, of course, so sentinels—agents-on-call—may also be sent on information-gathering missions or to put in place pre-emptive or failsafe measures. Those sentinels may be task
ed to investigate seemingly innocuous people and places (who turn out not to be), make deals with shady criminal networks (who turn out not to be trustworthy), or travel through a Pandora gate wormhole to analyze the relics of some alien ruin (and see if the threat that killed them is still real). Sentinels are recruited from every faction of transhumanity; those who aren’t ideologically loyal to the cause are hired as mercenaries.
Transhumanity’s Habitats
While Eclipse Phase is set in the not-too-distant future, the changes that have taken place due to the advancements of technology have transformed the Earth and its inhabitants almost beyond recognition.
The Earth has been left an ecologically devastated ruin, but transhumanity has taken to the stars. When Earth was abandoned, so too were the last of the great nation-states; transhumanity lacks a single unifying governing body and is instead subject to the laws and regulations of whomever controls a given habitat or the collective will of its inhabitants.
The majority of transhumanity is confined to orbital habitats or satellite stations scattered throughout the solar system. Some of these were constructed from scratch in the orbit or Lagrange points of planetary bodies, others have been hewn out of solid satellites and large asteroids. These stations have myriad purposes from trade to warfare, espionage to research.
Mars continues to be one of transhumanity’s largest settlements, though it too suffered heavily during the Fall. Numerous dome cities and settlements remain, and more are established each year, though the planet is only partially terraformed. Venus, Luna, and Titan are also home to significant populations. Additionally, there are a small number of colonies that have been established on exoplanets (on the other side of the Pandora gates) with environments that are not too hostile towards transhumanity.
Some transhumans prefer to live on large colony ships or linked swarms of smaller spacecraft, moving nomadically. These travelling habitats occupy different niches in the social and economic worlds: some of them intentionally exile themselves to the far limits of the solar system, far from everyone else, while others actively trade from station to station, serving as mobile black markets.
The Great Unknown
The areas of the galaxy that have felt the touch of transhumanity are few and far between. Lying betwixt these occasional outposts of questionable civilization are mysteries both dangerous and wonderful. Ever since the discovery of the Pandora gates, there has been no shortage of adventurers brave or foolhardy enough to strike out on their own into the unknown regions of space in hopes of finding more alien artifacts, or even establishing contact with one of the other sentient races in the universe.
The Mesh
The computer networks known as the “mesh” are all-pervasive. This ubiquitous computing environment is made possible thanks to advanced computer and nanofabrication technologies that allow unlimited data storage and near-instantaneous transmission capacities. With micro-scale, cheap-to-produce wireless transceivers so abundant, literally everything is wirelessly connected and online. Via implants or small personal computers, almost everyone has access to archives of information that dwarf the entire 21st-century internet and sensor systems that pervade every public place. People’s entire lives are recorded and lifelogged, shared with others on one of numerous social networks that link everyone together in a web of contacts, favors, and reputation systems.
Ego vs. Morph
The distinction between ego (mind and personality, including memories, knowledge, and skills) and morph (physical body and its capabilities) is one of the defining characteristics of Eclipse Phase.
A body is disposable. If it gets old, sick, or too heavily damaged, a character’s conscious can be digitized and downloaded into a new body. The process isn’t cheap or easy, but it does guarantee effective immortality—as long as you remember to back yourself up and don’t go insane. The term morph is used to describe any type of form a mind inhabits, whether a vat-grown clone sleeve, a synthetic robotic shell, a part-bio/part-synthetic “pod,” or even the purely electronic software state of an infomorph.
Morphs are expendable, but an ego represents the ongoing, continuous life path of mind and personality. This continuity may be interrupted by an unexpected death (depending on how recently the backup was made), but it represents the totality of a transhuman’s mental state and experiences.
White Hempen Sleeves
Ken Liu
The ego bridge hums softly around me as though I’m nestled in a conch shell. I have the sensation of floating weightless in space in the midst of billions of stars—ghostly “glows” caused by the nanobots running up and down my nerves, trying to capture the cascading potentials that cohere into my self.
I’m thrumming with anticipation, with the thrill of stepping into the unknown for the first time. Will I know? Will I detect the moment my consciousness splits like a real fork? Will I sense time stop, my mind suspended like a questioning tentacle curved invitingly in the deep, bottomless ocean of oblivion?
—
I hate myself.
The chances were 50/50, and I lost the coin flip.
Knowing you’re about to die is hell. Even if the one who put you in hell is yourself.
[Everybody dies. It’s what you do before you die that matters.]
There’s no glee in the voice, no palpable sense of relief. But that means nothing. I could have been suspended in time for hours, days, weeks, before being resleeved while my other self had plenty of time to whoop and celebrate his good luck.
I don’t bother responding to myself, safely ensconced in Octavia, that jellyfish-like aerostat of decadence hovering 55 kilometers above me. Fighting against the dizziness of a resleeving, I look up, and all I see is a roiling sea of orange clouds. A faint perpetual twilight filters through them.
I look down and back at myself, the unfamiliar sensation of twisting my head 180 degrees overwhelmed by the alienness of my body, the sleeve I had selected for myself: a five-meter long metal slitheroid shaped like an anaconda that roamed the forests of the Amazon from before the Fall, hardened and refurbished to survive long enough on the surface of Venus to accomplish the mission I gave myself.
[Get ready. This is going to hurt.]
Some switch seems to have been flipped in my mind and I scream even though I don’t have a voice.
It’s hot, hot enough that I feel my skin blistering, boiling, peeling off, erupting like the volcanoes on Ishtar Terra.
But I don’t have skin.
It feels like I’m being crushed from all sides by hydraulic presses, compressing my ribs, squeezing my chest cavity, flattening my lungs until they are thin as paper. The terror of not being able to breathe, a primitive fear, seizes my mind.
But I don’t have ribs or a chest cavity or lungs. I don’t need to breathe.
[The temperature at your location is 460 degrees Celsius, and the pressure is at 93 bars. I’ve recalibrated the sensors in your morph to give you the appropriate pain stimuli without immediately incapacitating you.]
You fucking bastard.
[This is to provide adequate motivation for you to seek higher altitudes to cool off and to get some relief from the sensation of suffocation.]
I curse myself. Of course I’m right—my first instinct upon realizing that I was the one sent to die was to lie down where I was and go to sleep—we can’t have that.
And so I begin my reluctant climb up Maxwell Montes, the tallest mountain on the surface of Venus, two kilometers taller than Mt. Everest on Earth. My body slithers over the parched basalt, strewn with pebbles and sharp-edged rocks created by chemical erosion. It’s easy to navigate: I’m always heading for higher ground, for that is the only direction that promises any relief from the crushing pressure and hellish heat.
The climb is slow going. With this much pressure, the carbon-dioxide-dominated atmosphere is technically no longer a gas or liquid, but b
ehaves as a supercritical fluid that is somewhere in between. I’m half-swimming, half crawling. I can feel the heat and the pressure weaken the joints in my morph. I, no, he—I can’t stand the idea that I’m the same person as that sadistic creep even though I am—has left me only one path.
Higher. Higher.
Finally, I’m through the supercritical fluid layer, and the air turns to a true gas through which I can move much faster. But far from feeling relief, the conditions around me have grown only more hellish. The wind howls around me at speeds never seen on Earth, threatening to topple me over—good thing that my slitheroid morph hugs the ground and has such a low center of gravity. Thunder booms and lightning flashes above me between cloud layers, and sheets of sulfuric acid rain pelt my body. The sensors in my morph translate the sensation of sizzling acid into a new kind of pain.
[Keep moving!]
I do my best to keep the pain at bay and keep on climbing. My only hope is to get above the snow line before the acid dissolves some critical component of my body.
Yes, snow line. The temperature near the surface of Venus is hot enough to vaporize metals like lead and bismuth. But with enough altitude, the metallic mist precipitates out of the atmosphere like frost, coating the top of Maxwell Montes in a shiny, reflective layer.
Finally, I emerge out of the clouds into an otherworldly snowscape. I take a moment to enjoy the cool and thin air (though it’s still near 400 degrees Celsius and the pressure is still about half of the level at the surface). One of my eyes has failed but the sight is still breathtaking: Maxwell Montes stands like an island above a sea of clouds, and the glinting snow is unmarred by any footprint. My body slithers over the ground, carving an endless sine wave through the snow. I’ve lost control over some of the segments due to damage from the heat and the acid, but now that I’m at the top of the mountain, the slitheroid morph should last long enough until a flyer can be sent down from the aerostat to pick me up.
I feel triumphant. Though I have been forced to do so, it is still an amazing accomplishment to have climbed a mountain taller than Mt. Everest and on which no transhuman has ever set foot.
