“None other than your own preference. If you didn’t like something before, you probably won’t like it now.”
“I won’t order any pizza with anchovies, then. Let’s see, it’s lunchtime. I’d like a rare roast beef sandwich, a couple of slices of Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato slices, yellow mustard on pumpernickel bread. On the side I want a big dill pickle. And I’d love a beer. Can I get something like a Sam Adams only without the alcohol? I really like the taste but I don’t want to get smashed.”
Gem had been playing with her keypad as I was speaking and a couple of trays came out of the wall, both with plates as I described and an unlabeled bottle of beer. Would you like to sit on the bed and eat?”
“It’s either that or the floor,” I answered.
“No, I can get some chairs but I think sitting next to each other while we eat will be cozier. I’ll order up some furniture after lunch.”
“As long as they have same day delivery.”
“Oh, they’ll be manufactured and delivered almost as quickly as the food.”
“Damn, would the couch potatoes love this place.”
She sat next to the wall and motioned for me to sit down next to her. She did her thing on the keypad some more and a long tray came out of the wall over our laps. She grabbed both of the trays with food on them and put them down so we could eat.
“I think you’ll like the beer. The processor is intelligent and sorted through the various Sam Adams flavors and came up with a taste that is the epitome of their products. If Sam Adams could come up with their perfect beer, this would be it. It’s nonalcoholic, of course. Just so you know, your body has the normal youth’s limited tolerance to alcohol so be careful. The society you are scheduled to be sent to have several alcoholic brews they make from various plants and roots and some of them are very potent. They are normally brought out for celebrations.”
“So you already know where I’m going.”
“We knew where we would send you before you were recruited. You will be in a group that is very similar to what you called Native Americans, prior to the European invasion.”
“You sound like they weren’t the first Americans.”
“Heavens, no. The first civilization on that land mass was a prehistoric species your science isn’t even aware of. There have been at least a dozen before the various tribes came to be.”
“Well, that should be interesting. I don’t know anything more than I got from TV about Indians.”
“Don’t worry about that. After your indoctrination you’ll be able to survive better than the most decorated brave in the village.”
“That’s quite a job. I don’t think you can do it in the month or two you were talking about.”
“You need to understand that this society is very technologically advanced. Look at the differences in technology with your society and that of the Indian as you call them. Take that difference or magnitude of advancement and multiply it by one hundred and you will have an idea of what we can do. You speak of wireless transmission in feet; we do it in billions of parsecs, instantaneously. You think of a terrabyte or two as a tremendous amount of storage while it miniscule in our realm. You had the suspicious cooperation of a handful of nations, we have treaties and trade agreements with billions of worlds and war is almost unknown to us. It will not take months to teach you what you need to know to take command of your new home.”
“When do we start?”
“Most of it will be done while you sleep. You’ll wake up with knowledge that will be as familiar as if you were born with it. You’ll pick up a primitive weapon and it will feel as if you’ve been using it for years.”
“If all my learning is done while I sleep, what do I do during the daytime?”
“There are plenty of things that will not be sleep taught. You asked questions earlier about vids and subscribers and I’m sure you’ll think of more.”
“You got that right. It seems the more I learn, the more questions I have.”
“That’s good. It makes my job a lot more fun and it also makes for good vid. And if you can’t think of another question or we just want to take a break and it’s too soon to eat, we can always fuck each other’s brains out.”
“Sounds good,” I said, reaching over and squeezing her thigh.
Neither of us had been idle while we were talking. The food and drink on my tray were the best I had ever had of that type. As Gem had said, the beer was the perfect Sam Adams beer. I didn’t miss the alcohol one bit. The foods were the same. The roast beef was beefier than any before, the Swiss cheese was Swiss cheesier. The mustard was more pungent and the pickle would make a New York deli owner green with envy. The pumpernickel was better than any bread I could ever remember tasting. And I could remember every slice or chunk of bread I ever put in my mouth. That was something new. I’d gotten forgetful with age but I never had the quality of memory I was now experiencing.
“I know I can taste things better than before but you’ve done the same thing with the foods as you did with the beer. The stuff on my plate is better than I could get on Earth.”
“Yes, it is. You recall how you sent me a concept when I didn’t understand your expression about the price of admission?”
I nodded my head.
“What we have produced for you to eat is like that. The concept of rare roast beef. Nothing on that tray existed before I punched my commands into the keypad. There was no need to use hormones to grow the beef faster or look better when displayed because we can produce as much as we want, instantaneously. It doesn’t have to last three days because we can always make what we need three days from now. There’s no need to pack thousands of cattle on a single acre of land because it took up no space before we created it. The cheese, the mustard and the bread aren’t going to last twenty minutes so there’s no purpose in stuffing them full of preservatives. The same with the pickle. There were no pesticides needed to produce the cucumber that was used to make it because it was just created as a pickle; there was no cucumber necessary.
“You say they took up no space before they were created,” I said. “How is that possible? What about conservation of matter and energy? You can’t create food out of nothing.”
“No, we can’t. But can you imagine what a cave man would have thought electricity was when you turned on a light or shocked him? The universe is alive with energy. Cosmic rays, gamma rays, leaked or expended energy that’s been transmitted or used to power something, the atmosphere, the breath we exhale, even thought consists of energy. And don’t think for a moment that your scientists understood all there was to know about the universe.”
“But turning energy into food, that just doesn’t seem natural.”
“Show me one thing that isn’t natural. You can’t find anything that was created out of something that didn’t already exist. Insecticides, aspirin, psychotropic drugs, growth hormones, you can’t come up with anything that isn’t made from something else. Yes, man mixes and processes and bombards with energy and goes through all kinds of gyrations but it’s all natural. How can you say that a pill to give you a hard on isn’t natural but a tub of butter is? You didn’t get butter without modifying what was provided by nature and you sure as hell didn’t get the tub. We have found a way to create the essence of whatever you want out of the environment. Talk about your Fuckin’ Magic. There’s no process, no time, no gestation inside a parent, then maturing on a farm until it’s ready, no growing in the ground, then being picked and processed. Not even cooked. Hot tea is created hot. Not by boiling water and pouring it over ground tea leaves.”
“But it’s not going to be like that where I’m going,” I said.
“No, you’re going to have to find and chase down an animal, find a way to kill it, skin it and cook its meat. But I guarantee it won’t be full of growth hormones and it will taste better than anything that is.”
“I can live with that.”
“Good. You won’t have much choice.”
&nb
sp; “OK, I’ll enjoy the food while I’m here and I’m sure I’ll enjoy the food in my new home. So tell me about vid.”
“Vid is a combination of many scientific advances. I am not saying it’s the culmination of them because there’s always somewhere new to go. Many people on Earth thought high definition television with seven discreet sound sources was as good as things could get. Now they’re coming out with a primitive three dimensional picture that requires that the viewer wear glasses.
“Earth is not the only planet to invent some kind of picture and sound transmission. Others learned how to send other senses, taste, smell, touch and then graduated to emotions as well. There was always something that transmitted and something at the other end that received. But no matter where this type of technology existed, it ran into two problems. First, the signal lost strength as it traveled. On your planet, TV could barely make it from one city to another. Some were planet wide, others covered several planets in the same solar system. The other problem was speed. Nobody could figure out a way to transmit anything faster than the speed of light. Transmitting a signal that would lose strength and take years, centuries or millenia to reach the far location just didn’t make any sense.
“Then, someone discovered a way to travel faster than light. Just like we made your food instantly without any steps between the ordering of the food and its appearance, we discovered a way to travel from one point to another without anything in between. Instantaneous travel, from one end of the universe to another or anywhere in between.”
“You keep saying ‘We’. Do you mean to tell me that your scientists came up with all this stuff? Here, on this planet?”
“First, we are not on a planet. We didn’t discover it; it was discovered in several worlds at about the same time. One of your scientists had a saying, something like ‘When it’s time to have steam engines, someone will discover steam engines’. It was time for instant travel. So, when I say ‘We’, I mean ‘Mankind’.”
The word she said was not ‘Mankind’. Take that idea and expand it to fit the universe. All intelligent life, whether actually involved or even aware or not. For example, you can say that mankind invented the atom bomb yet very few men and even fewer women have any concept of what an atom bomb is. If you have any doubts, lock a bunch of people in a room with the necessary equipment and materials and tell them to build one. There are many words that we used that couldn’t be expressed on Earth. They just wouldn’t have any reality and the most fitting response would be ‘Huh?’ As I relate my experiences to you, I’ll attempt to use words that will get the essence across to you with an occasional explanation.
“OK.” I said. “You talk for a couple of minutes and I come up with ten more questions. What do you mean, we’re not on a planet? And how the hell can you travel from one place to another without taking any time?”
“Believe it or not, the answers to both your questions are almost the same. I am not one of the people who discovered it and most of it is FM to me. There were many people on Earth who had limited knowledge about their automobiles. Their concept was, ‘I turn the key, step on the gas and steer’. This is similar.
“The primary discovery was that the physical universe is both reality and an illusion. If you look at it one way, it exists with all its laws, but tilt your head and squint and it doesn’t exist. The theory is to quantum physics as quantum physics is to simple arithmetic. We are not presently in the universe, we’re in what you would call hyperspace, even though that doesn’t exist. We are a series of coordinates, just like an IP address. Only we don’t reside in some server in a physical location.”
“But this stuff is all real. I mean I can see you and I can feel the bed and I can taste the food and see the monitors and the displays.”
“Yes, it’s all as real as you can sense it. It’s as real as anything else.”
“OK. I don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about but I’ll go with it.”
“Our levels of understanding aren’t as different as you might imagine. So let’s use the concept of IP addresses to demonstrate it. In the Internet, each address is four sets of three digits. Our addresses consist of an infinite number of sets, each with an infinite number of digits.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Exactly. But every single location, whether in the physical universe or not can be pinpointed. Right now, all we need is this room, so that’s all that’s here. If we needed something else, it would be here.”
“Where were you before you came in the door this morning? Or whenever it was when I woke up?”
“Morning is fine. I doubt we’ll come up with anything any better. The answer to that is I was someplace else. I was actually on the planet I grew up on until I arrived here. There is nothing on the other side of that door. But if one of us opened it expecting something to be on the other side, there would be something there. FM to the extreme.”
“I guess. So how does vid fit in with this?”
“Do you remember that I told you there’s an implant smaller than a cell in you that allows you to understand and speak countless languages?”
“Yes.”
“There’s another that transmits everything that’s happening to you, even things you don’t realize. You are sending a fraction of it to the displays in this room. All the pictures, the level of emotions and feeling, the tone, whether it’s joy or anger. The only one you aren’t sending out is the bar graph that shows the number of people watching. And I use the term watching loosely. What they’re doing is so much more.”
“How can I be transmitting all those views of me and the room?”
“Have you ever felt like you were looking down on yourself?”
“Once or twice when I was dreaming.”
“It’s similar to that. You can get all those views, you just don’t do it, at least not consciously.”
“So I’m sending out all that information and you’re sending it to billions of people?”
“No, you’re sending it to billions of people.”
“Whoa, back up. I don’t understand.”
“Let’s use Earth’s Internet again. There were many sites that let you get something regularly in hopes of getting you to buy something, either from them or a third party. Joke of the day, word of the day, this or that daily comic. There were others that will notify you if something new had been posted. And still others that will send you anything that was posted, immediately.”
“I’m familiar with all that.”
“OK. Now, the item for sale is your experience. The person who buys it is called a subscriber. What he gets is what you are experiencing. Take when I mentioned crystal radios to you. You had a couple of memories that were very intense. Tell me about them.”
“First I thought about the actual thing, the crystal set. How tough it was to tune it just right, to catch the signals that were magically transmitted from somewhere else. It was an adventure because you never knew what new thing you were going to come across. And I thought that there aren’t any adventures like that anymore and there won’t ever be anything as exciting. Then I remembered my best buddy and the times the two of us would play with the crystal set in my basement.”
“Good. All that, everything you saw and thought, any emotions, any smells, all that was transmitted to anyone who was subscribed to it. Let’s examine one person it went out to. At the same time you were experiencing that memory, it would appear to him that he was experiencing it. Not as a memory but as if it was happening to him, right then. Got that?”
“So far, so good.”
“Did you ever run across an Internet site that put out a daily or weekly summary? Something they sent to you that went over what was posted and allowed you to click on it and go to the actual post?”
“Sure.”
“Some of our subscribers get something similar. It gives a hint at what you experienced along with the intensity and the general tone. Sort of like sending the big graph, the color display and a sen
tence stating it was a memory of you and your friend discovering something. They pay to get the summary itself and they can choose to experience anything in it for an additional fee. Now the chip inside you isn’t powerful enough to handle broadcasting on demand. All your broadcasts, every second of every day, are stored here. When someone orders some of it, he’s able to receive it. You send out data that goes everywhere, the instant it happens. Those who want to view it have a chip that tunes it in like your crystal radio. Or better still, like a boxing match on Pay For View.
“Some people want to be notified immediately. Maybe if the feelings graph reaches a certain level. Maybe when a specific color or any of several colors is shown. They can choose to get patched in to your live broadcast or they can get it from the beginning from here. Technically, there’s no difference but any subscriber will tell you there’s something better about a live broadcast. We don’t try to convince them they’re wrong.
“Some automatically get turned on at a specific level or color. And then there are the highest premium subscribers. They get everything live, 24 hours a day.”
“How can people survive while doing this? What about the guy who’s driving his car or flying his space bus and all of a sudden he’s in the middle of my blow job?”
“You’ve heard that humans only use a small percentage of their minds, haven’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Well, some beings use that unused portion to subscribe. All of the receiver chips have a function built in that will not allow a transmission to endanger the recipient. In the instance of the person flying his space bus, if there was such a thing, the transmission would be stored for a time it was not dangerous for him to experience it, sort of like your Tivo. But it’s quite possible there would be no danger with him going through your experience while flying his space bus.
“There are also beings who no longer have a body or any material existence. These are disembodied minds, existing only as a consciousness, located at a point in the ether, nothing more than a set of coordinates like we discussed. Many of these exist just to gather data, experience after experience, subscribing to thousands or millions of beings, full time.”
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