Home Planet: Arcadia (Part 3)

by Sedgwick, T. J.

  “There’s a college here?”

  “Not here on Hawaii—in the Forever World,” she said.

  “Oh, right …”

  “So once you graduate they select a handful of grads each year for future leadership positions—councilor roles, management of this facility, that kind of thing. You’ve got to do your time in just about every job on the island, including this one. Can’t manage what you don’t understand.”

  “Makes sense. So how long you gotta run reception for?”

  We kept eyes locked, neither of us embarrassed by it. She tilted her head, pausing again, a faint smile parting her lips. This woman had a quiet confidence about her.

  “Just a two-week stint is all,” she said. “My next assignment’s a longer one, with the police.”

  “I used to be a cop, back in the day. Back when the real world looked like the Forever World.”

  “Awesome,” she said, her face lighting up. “Maybe I can pick your brains one evening.”

  Patton emerged from wherever he’d been.

  “Yeah, that’d be nice, Talia,” I said.

  She looked down at her computer display.

  “Not interrupting anything here am I?” said Patton, playfully.

  “Just making friends,” I said.

  “Ready?”

  I nodded.

  “We’re all set up now. Let’s go before we miss your slot.”

  I bade farewell to the lovely Talia. Definitely some chemistry, despite the fact I wasn’t looking. I was sure we’d meet again sooner or later—hard not to in the Dome City. Patton started walking; I followed, taking a glance over my shoulder at the smiling Talia who waved a little goodbye.

  “You know, Dan,” said Patton, “one of my ancestors came from the Juno Ark—not that uncommon—but he used to be a cop, too. In twenty-first century Chicago. Guy named Mike Lawrence.”

  I did a double take.

  As in my buddy from the Juno mission?

  “Are you normally like this?” he asked, grinning at my second moment in the last few minutes.

  “Sorry, no I’m not, but… but I knew Mike Lawrence. I said goodbye to him what seems like no more than a week ago—when we both went into stasis. When I woke up, he wasn’t a corpse like most of the others. His stasis pod was empty. So he made it here?”

  “Well, I’m here aren’t I? Come on, it’ll be clearer once we reach the Hive.”

  I followed Patton through the white corridors of the clean, modern facility. This was not at all what I expected to find on post-apocalyptic Earth. Yet here it was. We passed offices and computer labs and rooms full of people conducting small-scale production. Our route took us into what was the crater rim and a giant room with row upon row of server stacks.

  He stopped and turned as if proudly presenting a computing wonder of the world.

  “Fantastic isn’t it?” he said smiling. “Come on, not far now. I think you’ll find this place interesting, Dan.”

  4

  Kale Patton led me past the rows of servers in a facility that made thoughts of the harsh frozen world disappear. It could’ve been any tech firm or large corporation from the twenty-first century. Up ahead was a non-descript side door with the words Hive, neatly painted above it.

  “It’s nothing to do with bees,” said Patton.

  “Ha, I was thinking more The Borg.”

  “Sorry, the what?”

  “You know, the hive mind, like the cyborgs from Star Trek… Never mind.”

  We entered the long narrow room, which extended off to the left sixty feet or so. Along both walls ran a simple wooden bench with two dozen people sat on a mixture of wooden and ancient office chairs. Each wore a virtual reality headset and black gloves. A set of black rubber pressure pads below sat on the floor beneath each foot. Wires ran from each of the five accessories to a small dark cube—presumably a computer—below the desktop. Some of them spoke quietly into their mics while others grasped at things unseen. Many pushed their footpads as though running or walking. I knew enough about VR to know they were in a different world. Or at least, their minds perceived they were. It wasn’t how I’d imagined it and looked distinctly low-tech compared to the full-body immersion back in 2070.

  He motioned for me to sit down at the only empty chair, right opposite the entrance.

  “So is this the Forever World?” I asked, my optimism palpable.

  I picked up the headset to examine it.

  “No, this is the Hive room, in there,” he said, pointing to the headset, “…is the Forever World.”

  An involuntary smile grew all over my face. So it was true what they’d shown Valdus. The Forever World still lived on? Then, doubt clouded my sunny thoughts.

  “Hey Kale, so not only did it survive the global catastrophe, but people have kept this virtual world going for over five centuries? Seems a little far-fetched.”

  He’d pulled out a small tablet device from his pocket and plugged it into a terminal fixed to the wall.

  “Well, if you don’t believe me, go say hi to Mike Lawrence. I’ve just paged him. We’ll insert you in his hometown of Chicago. He knows all the history better than me.”

  I looked up at Patton, somehow apprehensive of stepping into the unknown, despite the fact that it was just a simulation.

  “I know our gear is antiquated—we’re working on full-body immersion suits, but our resources are fairly limited and adding servers and VR stations is higher up the priority list right now. Go on. Put on the gear.”

  Patton stood opposite the terminal fiddling with his device as I donned the gloves and then the dark-screened headset.

  Moments later, his voice came over the headset.

  “Can you hear me, Dan?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Good, I can hear you, too. Now, I’m just initiating the application on your machine. You’ll see your avatar’s body on a dark screen first, then the Forever World will appear and you’ll think you’re there. You’ve got a limited time, I’m afraid. Ten thousand people and twenty-four stations means rationing. Okay, let’s not waste any more time. Have a good visit.”

  “Thanks.”

  Within seconds, I looked down to see my body re-appear as an avatar in a featureless black space. A long-sleeved red sweatshirt covered my torso and arms and photo-realistic hands, which flexed and moved when I did the same in real life. The arms and chest were a little smaller than my own, but I guessed they didn’t have an XXL avatar to spare that day. Looking down I wore dark sneakers and light blue jeans. I gave the rubber footplates a go and, when I alternated them, the avatar’s legs walked. Then I realized the footplates had both heel and ball pads. Pressing on the heel pads alone made me walk backwards, pressing on the front or both caused forward motion. It took some getting used to, but I guessed it would do for most things. I wondered how I’d climb a ladder should I ever need to.

  The shaded city streets of downtown Chicago flashed into existence. What I saw blew my mind. I looked around at the people going about their business and driverless pods buzzing up and down the broad avenue. Looking up at the tall, sparkling clean buildings, I could see the blue, cloudless sky above. Passersby chatted; some of them gave me a momentary glance, no doubt wondering why a guy was standing there gaping inanely. I turned around and saw a café called Elixir Coffee. Patrons sat out on the sidewalk in summer clothes and the foliage on the tree-lined street confirmed the season. Had I been sedated and woke up with the VR gear on I could have easily mistaken this place for the real late twentieth century Chicago. I’d not visited for a long time, but the familiarity of 2070 America permeated my mind as though I’d never left.

  I heard someone laughing behind me.

  “Man, you stick out like a sore thumb.”

  I turned to see a uniformed police officer that sounded like Mike Lawrence and even resembled him a little but didn’t look like my buddy from the Juno.

  “Kale told me you’d be here—that’s you, Dan Luker, right?”

>   “Yeah, it’s me. Is that you Mike?”

  “Of course it’s me. Who else? … Oh, ‘cause I don’t look like the dude everyone knew and loved? You know, sometimes I forget the fact myself. But hey, I’m still black and good lookin’ ain’t I?”

  I chuckled. The voice was the same, but the avatar wouldn’t be picked in a line-up.

  “So what happened?”

  “Okay, take a look at yourself in that shiny glass window over there.”

  He pointed to the small deli next to the café.

  My reflection looked like some guy I’d never seen before. It surprised me, but I wasn’t sure why. I mean, how would Patton or anyone else have gotten my likeness into the Forever world?

  “That’s not me, I hear you say,” he said bursting out laughing. “Well, brother, let me tell you, once that asteroid hit it damn near as hell wiped out every man, woman and child on the planet. So they may have had all that fancy body-scanning tech before the impact—great for all them folks that uploaded before 2075—but for me, well I was a few years too late, man. But hey, great to see you, Officer Luker!”

  I was lost for words. So many questions buzzed around my mind.

  “But…”

  “Come on, man, let me get you a coffee and a donut. This place is good.”

  We entered the café and he ordered a long black and a donut with all sorts of fancy toppings. I just went with the same. It wasn’t like I’d actually be eating it. The young woman served us enthusiastically and put up valiantly with my staring. I wasn’t trying to be rude, but I’d started scanning every simulated face for imperfections, for signs of pixilation or other artifacts of the ones and zeros behind the image. I found none and we sat at a table in the corner by the window.

  “You remind me of the first time Kale Patton came and introduced himself. You see he’s my descendant, but you probably noticed he’s a white dude and as you can see I’m not.”

  He laughed and continued. “Well, we’re all mixed race in truth to the point where race is a meaningless concept. But yeah, he’s twenty generations younger than me. You can learn a lot being alive for half a millennium, man.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Sorry. I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s just so good to see you. I had no idea you’d make it.”

  He stirred two sugars into his coffee and took a swig.

  “When I got off the ship there was no time. Captain Gutiérrez’s people—the loyalists who were following orders to come home—were all dead. But so were the mutineers, or so we thought. It appeared they still had two of their androids doing their dirty work. We were the last batch to wake up. And when we did them damned android came for us. Maybe they thought we were dead already, or maybe they just forgot about us, I don’t know. A lot of people died in their pods, man. I guess we were the lucky ones.”

  “And what happened when you landed on Earth?”

  “We homed in on the transmitter at Hawaii, landing on Oahu. Man, that was one desperate situation. The whole world had gone to hell. Earthquakes all the time, hundreds of thousands of corpses all over the island, the city destroyed. Thank the Lord, the sea still had fish and the city had tins of food. And Koko Crater contained Silicon Life Works. The crater protected it and it had backup generators. We just needed to dig through the snow then scavenge enough diesel to get the computers up and running again. If it wasn’t for that place, I would’ve died at the age of fifty-two.”

  “So, what, you uploaded your mind before you died, then passed away sometime after?”

  “That’s how it works, Officer Luker! I know things have come a long way since then, but I’d still rather be here. This is my home; my heaven I guess you could say.”

  He took a big bite, devouring a third of his donut in one go.

  “I’m having trouble getting my head around this. So when you eat that donut and drink that coffee, you actually feel it?”

  He paused a little, chewing his food frantically to answer me.

  “Yeah, just like when I was alive. They didn’t call it the Forever World for nothing, brother. This is a very sophisticated simulation using a huge amount of computing power. Every neuron of my mind was scanned with precise fidelity. The world knows I’m eating this donut, knows what it contains and, therefore, knows what signals my taste buds should send to my modeled brain. Some the others in this coffee shop are like me. Some are like you. Some are different from both of us.”

  “Okay, I kind of get it, but you said some of these people are like you. So what are the rest?”

  He pointed at me, smiling with a mouth half-full of coffee and donut.

  “Some are mind uploads as you call them. Some might be visitors—but unlikely given they have so few VR stations in the Hive. Everyone else… they’re bots—AI beings which give the place a sense of life, some buzz, some pizzazz. They take about zero-point-zero-one percent of the computer resources of a human mind. We can’t go populating the Forever World with as many humans as we like—there simply aren’t the resources.”

  “Resources where?”

  “At Koko Crater. You see, that was just a branch facility never meant to compete with the main one in Silicon Valley.”

  “Which was destroyed, right?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. In the months leading up to the impact, they transferred some minds across and uploaded as many as they could. But not everyone. Many millions of people re-died when San Francisco went down,” he said, somberly, his natural energy waning for a moment.

  I wondered if Mom and Nikki had been among them, suffering not just their natural death but their Forever World death too. That was all assuming they’d been uploaded in the first place.

  “That’s bad.”

  “Yes, it is. And not just that, but it’s limited the size of the Forever World itself. What you’ll notice, if you ever get the chance to explore this great country of ours, is that most of it isn’t actually there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that only a few major cities and a few small areas of National Parks made it. Hey man, I’ve tried going past the city limits, but it’s like that Stephen King classic, Under the Dome. It’s like, like there’s this force field. You can see the scenery and everything beyond it, you just can’t go there ‘cause it doesn’t exist in the model.”

  “So what happens if too many minds are uploaded or the world gets too big?”

  “Very good question and something I’ve had the misfortune of experiencing. You see, this is all one big computer simulation, and when computers get overworked they slow right down. Now that’s an annoyance for you using a device in the real world, but for beings like me it’s far worse.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s like my mind has slowed, like a haze has come down and I can’t think clearly. And everything seems quicker because it affects minds more than it does the world itself. Until you’ve experienced it you don’t know what is like. It’s just terrible, man.”

  He took another swig of coffee and nodded a hello to a pretty woman in glasses leaving the café with a friend.

  “So that’s why they’re building more servers over at Koko Crater?”

  “Exactly right, man. More servers, more people. No servers and people can’t get uploaded and die for real. Forever.”

  “Can you die for real in here? I mean, it’s the Forever World, right?”

  “Not of old age. Accidents hurt every bit as much as they would for you, but they don’t kill you. Maybe psychologically scar you, but leave no lasting effects on the avatar.”

  “What about disease?”

  “I can’t die of disease in the biological sense, but there is one way.”

  “Which is?”

  “If your mind-code becomes corrupted. Example: if the media it’s stored on and the back-up gets destroyed. There were also viruses, but they don’t bother anyone no more. Ever since the internet went down with the impact our scientists started winning the battle. The last viral code went
extinct fifty years after in 2125.”

  “I guess hackers had more immediate concerns, like surviving.”

  “Right you are, man!” he said, chuckling.

  I made a clumsy attempt to pick up the coffee, spilling it over the table, some of it dripping onto Mike’s legs.

  “Damn it! I’m sorry man.”

  “Hey, don’t worry, you’re just getting used to it. There’s a reason cop’s pants are dark.”

  A waitress came over and started the wiping up the spill.

  “Refill, sir?” she asked pleasantly.

  “Please,” I said, turning back to Mike. “So you’re actually still a cop? Why does the Forever World need cops?”

  We’ve still got criminals, you know.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure we do. They get sent to Cook County Jail across town. The worst ones get their mind upload erased—like the death penalty, but worse if you ask me.”

  “Is that right? Wow...”

  “Brother, you still don’t get it do you?” he said jovially. “To me, this place is real. As real as your world is to you. And like most of us, I still need purpose and work gives me that purpose.”

  He laughed and patted my avatar’s shoulder. It felt weird that no sensation arrived at my brain because everything looked real to me, but until my mind was uploaded, it wouldn’t feel real like it did for Mike.

  “So, you wanna show me around your city?” I said.

  “I can, but how much time’d Patton give you, man? It ain’t gonna make you too popular you go over-running your allowance.”

  “I have no idea—he didn’t say.”

  “Best you check ... I’ll wait right here,” he said, before bursting into laughter.

  That was the only reality in which he could now live. I had a choice, at least within the bounds of my time allowance. I took off the headset and was struck by the sudden change of scene—one second in a downtown coffee shop in twenty-first century Chicago, the next in a drab computer room.

  “You done?” said Patton, still standing to my right by the terminal.