Home Planet: Arcadia (Part 3)

by Sedgwick, T. J.

  “Who’s that?”

  Nikki turned around, still holding my hand, which I could see but not feel.

  “Speak, Danny,” Nikki said.

  I could hardly manage it, but I held back the tears.

  “Hi ,mom, it’s me. I’m using an avatar. I survived, mom.”

  Mom just stared open-jawed at the voice she hadn’t heard in five centuries.

  “Are you sure?” she asked absently.

  “Yes, mom. He knew the name of his teddy bear growing up. Only he would know that!”

  Mom started hyperventilating but managed to run and wrap her arms around me in tears.

  Nikki joined us and we said nothing as we held each other close and wept for a long time.

  ***

  After going inside, we sat on the couch and relived old times growing up. I sat in the middle, arm in arm as their minds, immune from the ravages of time, recalled things as if they were years ago, not centuries. Partly, it was just a fond trip down memory lane, but I got the feeling they wanted further reassurance it was really me. It can’t have been easy reuniting with an avatar likeness of their long lost son and brother. It wasn’t lost on me that even centuries after her death, Juliet’s gift to the world kept on giving.

  “When we said goodbye… Well, I never expected to see you again, Daniel,” said mom, the top of her blouse damp with tears. “I looked at your pictures and your videos every day you know.”

  “We hoped you’d come back for us, but we didn’t think it’d be like this,” said Nikki.

  “What did you think it’d be like?” I said.

  Nikki said, “When they announced the asteroid the whole world thought it was a joke. Then we thought it was a mistake. Some big overreaction, like you always hear on the news. Then the president came on and that’s when we knew it was real. No one took responsibility for the mistake—You know that story? About them tagging the Vogel asteroid as a commercial space rock?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  I regarded her face and how it perfectly represented her. She was still the tall, striking movie star blonde with blue eyes and delicate features that I’d always known. When I’d left in 2070, she’d been twenty-nine. Now—as in when the Forever World last updated—she’d have been thirty-three, a year older than me when I’d left. As long as the virtual world persisted, she’d stay that way forever. Hence, the name, Forever World, I guessed.

  “When everyone believed it, it was dog-eat-dog. We were the lucky ones—to have our minds uploaded.”

  “How did that happen exactly?”

  “It was by lottery, Daniel,” said Mom.

  “Officially, yes it was,” said Nikki. “But I’ve had a lot of time to think about that. The fact you were with Juliet made them pull some string over at Silicon Life Works. That’s my theory, anyway.”

  Mom frowned at her, shaking her head. Nikki put up her hands.

  “Just a theory.”

  “There are enough theories floating around about the apocalypse already,” said mom. “Even with all our wisdom of five hundred years, no one knows why. Just human error and that’s that.”

  “Do you know what happened to the biological you?” I said.

  “No one knows for sure because we were isolated at Koko Crater. We were mind-scanned two months before impact. After that, we lived our lives and our biological selves lived theirs. The Forever World link to the internet went down shortly after the asteroid hit,” said Nikki. “It came down at 6 a.m. Pacific Time on June 4th, 2075 in central China. We know some of the effects from footage that survived.”

  She looked up accessing long-held memories, and then continued, her eyes more sullen and thoughtful.

  “Many of the lighter buildings on the West Coast were demolished by hypersonic shock waves that circled the globe. Earthquakes came next. Our biological selves were home, here in South Beverly Park. The Enquiry’s best guess is that ejecta sent up by the impact came down and destroyed the area. Or maybe it was the firestorm that raged or the tsunamis that washed inland. No one knows for sure.”

  “Well, I can tell you one thing—LA is under ice right now,” I said.

  “We heard from an outside news report a while back. Two explorers that went missing—Lars and David something or other. They sent a radio message back when they flew over there. Then no one ever heard from them again,” said mom.

  “Yeah, well, expect an update on that story sometime soon,” I said, going on to explain the whole Valdus murder trial thing.

  “What other outside news did you get after the impact?” I said.

  “Oh, we lost an entire decade before the people on Hawaii restarted the servers at Koko Crater,” said Mom. “I remember it distinctly. First, the internet went down and we were cut off from the real world. A week later, we just blacked out. Everyone did. Then, when we came to, ten years had passed.”

  “Yeah, that’s when we started getting news from the outside again,” said Nikki. “The scientists over at Caltech cracked it, hooking up a simple text feed at first. The Forever World Caltech, that is. Don’t know how they did it, but they did.”

  “Did you hear from survivors of the Juno Ark?” I said.

  “Why yes, Daniel, some of them came to Hawaii,” said mom. “Some of them have since had their minds uploaded. We know most of what happened, but until today we never managed to find out what happened to you.”

  She smiled fondly, stroking my face before planting a kiss on my cheek.

  “My little boy, home at last.”

  “Mom, what does it feel like being alive for so long? Do you ever get tired of life?”

  “Oh, some people do get tired of living, but not me,” she said.

  “Me neither. Even in the Forever World there’s so much to learn and the more you know the more you realize there is to know. Mom’s an awesome salsa dancer these days,” said Nikki, smiling.

  “You see, we don’t have the ailments of old age and our minds are at least as sharp as ever, maybe wiser,” said Mom. “And the relationships we have are deeper and more meaningful than anything someone could have in a human lifetime. I still miss your father, though, even after all these years.” She gave a mirthless chuckle.

  “It’s a shame they didn’t have this technology when he was alive,” she said.

  Or when Juliet was still with us, I thought.

  “So do you have a better half?” I said, eyeing Nikki accusingly.

  She threw her head back and giggled. “Where do I start?” she said, beaming.

  “How about you, mom?”

  “A lady never tells... but I have met some very nice male friends over the years.”

  “Let’s put it this way, Danny—no one expects to be married for life anymore. What does that even mean, anyway?” said Nikki.

  “So what do they do?”

  “Just have partners. Some last, some don’t. No different to friendships really, except for that the obvious Traditionalists still get married, but the vows have changed a lot,” she said.

  “Yeah, ‘til death do us part doesn’t really work here, does it,” I said.

  “Right!” she said.

  “Do you still act?”

  “Of course—it’s still what I love. My current role is in a cop drama set in 1980s Miami. First season was a big hit.”

  “Do people outside of the Forever World watch it too?” I said.

  “Yeah, I think so, but they don’t have many TVs out there. They’re kinda poor, materially speaking. I’d rather be here any day,” she said, happily.

  And there was the seminal choice for me too. Live an immortal life as the ones and zeros of a giant simulation or pursue my dream of making it in the real world. Getting the Juno working and colonizing Aura-c. Impossible choices. Or maybe, in reality, there were no choices. Perhaps Reichs’ scheme to resurrect the crippled starship was just a pipe dream. Being home felt good but no matter how real it felt I knew it wasn’t real.

  Mom and Nikk
i told me about their lives, their friends, their work and their hobbies. What surprised me most was how damned normal it all was to them. For me, it was anything but.

  I heard a voice in my head. The voice of Patton from another dimension.

  “Five minutes, Dan,” he said.

  “Okay. Thanks, Kale,” I called back.

  “Who’s Kale?”

  I told them. A biological human had not visited them for centuries, so it was out of the ordinary to say the least.

  There was one last thing I needed to ask. I hoped it didn’t upset them, but it was important to my decision-making.

  “Do you get used to the fact that you’re just a consciousness made up of ones and zeros in a big computer simulation?”

  “It takes some getting used to,” said Mom. “We talk about it occasionally and still think about it sometimes, but most of the time we forget about it. It’s what they called the Simulation Hypothesis. Most of us here have studied it. Even before the Forever World academics debated it.”

  “There’s a long philosophical history to the idea that reality’s an illusion,” said Nikki. “The only difference now is we’re sure about it. I guess biological humans never will be.”

  “Okay, time’s just about up now,” said Patton.

  “Alright. Just give me half a minute,” I said, urgently.

  We said our emotional farewells, but I’d visit again as soon as I could secure another time slot.

  I took off the headset before it went to black screen and removed the gloves. As I sat back in the chair, a whirlpool of emotions swam around my mind.

  “You look... blown away,” said a chuckling Patton.

  “I am.”

  “Sorry to have to do this, but Fran has her slot starting right now,” he said.

  I got up, yielding my seat to a middle-aged woman, apologizing for my tardiness. She seemed courteous in her actions like most I’d witnessed at Koko.

  After thanking Patton and some brief conversation about how it went, I decided to go for a walk around the dome city in mid-morning.

  Entering the Forever World had radically altered my own view of the universe. No longer was there just the endless expanses of outer space and Aura—now I realized that, with enough resources the inner space of the Forever World could be the real destination. It was far more easily attainable than the dream of reaching the Second-Earth around Aura. But none of it was real. Some deep and meaningful thinking lay on the walk ahead. I had to find a way to fulfill humankind’s destiny and my own.

  8

  The day passed quickly and Laetitia and I saw plenty. The dome didn’t run itself and Patton, Baas and Aulani had council business to attend, so they assigned several citizens to show us around. I think they were under the impression we’d settle. Maybe they were right. We got to see the geothermal plant, the well site and geo-gun rig as well as the 3D fabricators and stock materials facility that fed it. They had two of the house-sized machines and it was no understatement that without them they’d be more like Angels Station than a twenty-first century eco-community. The fabricators represented the world’s most flexible manufacturing plants. They could produce anything from dome struts to wellheads, from reading glasses to surgical tools. Since they had only two and both were of sizeable proportions, they were constantly on the go. They were a production bottleneck, though, prioritized for important items or batches of items. This meant that many things—like my guesthouse toothbrush—were still made traditionally. It kept people gainfully employed and they seemed contented with it.

  Perhaps the world had it all wrong back in the time after the industrial revolution. Maybe humans got no joy from being one cog in a massive corporate gear chain. Money seemed to trump almost everything back then. Sure, they had money in twenty-sixth century Hawaii, but poverty didn’t stalk the land. Likewise, no one could make unemployment a lifestyle choice either. Status symbols seemed to be frowned upon and no one liked it if someone acted too superior unless they’d truly earned it. The exception seemed to be Juno Ark survivors. They treated us with the utmost kindness and respect. There was still a fascination with our story and the whole history of the Juno Project. I supposed it wouldn’t be long before we’d be giving lectures at the school or in the town square.

  For all of their virtues, the locals still had their problems, though. The seven deadly sins were still alive and well. Human nature, I guessed.

  In the late afternoon, I accompanied Laetitia back to the shuttle for her recharge. We spoke to Reichs about Project Phoenix and I told him about my family being alive and well in the Forever World. To say he became jumpy at the mention of it would have been an understatement. If I was going to be working with Reichs for the foreseeable future, I needed to trust him. We all did. And for that, I’d need to uncover his past. He certainly didn’t want to tell me, evading most questions about his former life. I’d thought that his apparent eccentricity was due to years spent without human contact on the Juno Ark. But the more I spoke to him, the more I felt his was all an act designed to further his goals. Chief amongst them was that he did not want to return to Earth. I thought I knew why, but there was no way to prove it, no way until I’d entered the Forever World again.

  ***

  The next day came around and with it news of a timeslot from Patton.

  “Go ahead, take your time seeing your family,” he said as the black screen around my avatar gave way to Nikki’s front door.

  It was around 9 a.m. and the start of another late-summer’s day in digital paradise. Just like last time, I rapped on the door.

  “I’m around the back,” came Nikki’s distant voice, accompanied by the splash of water.

  I took the path around to the left of the house and went through the wrought iron gate to the backyard. The patio on the right still held the familiar table and chairs, and in front of it, Nikki swam breaststroke in the small pool. She stood when she saw me.

  “Hey, Danny! You’re back. That’s awesome you got a timeslot so soon.”

  She climbed the steps at the end and ran over to me in her red bikini, hugging me and making me flinch at the thought of getting wet. That was before I remembered I could feel nothing in this world, not water, not a hug, not a kiss on the cheek from my sister.

  “Yeah, it was a nice surprise,” I said, beaming from ear to ear.

  She went over to the patio where a towel hung over a chair back and wrapped it around herself, taking a seat. I sat next to her as she poured a glass of water from the jug and put on her shades.

  “Want me to get you a glass?”

  “No thanks. Where’s mom?”

  “Oh, doing her usual Sunday morning cycling route with friends. She likes to keep active, alright.”

  We chatted for a while. I told her about Hawaii and she told me about her friends and work. It amazed me that she still knocked around with some of her buddies I’d met at the party in her first apartment all those years ago. She’d organized it to welcome me to town. It was where I’d first set eyes on Juliet, through the camera of Nikki’s entry phone. I fell quiet for a while but decided to suppress the memories before they derailed my train of thought completely. So I changed the subject.

  “Nikki, I’ve got a question.”

  “Go on,” she said, her interest piqued.

  “Have you ever heard of Laetitia Reichs?”

  She chewed her lip, looking up as she accessed her modeled neural network.

  “Hmm... That name is familiar. Can you describe her, tell me something about her?”

  “About five-ten, kind of Latina-looking, blonde hair... gorgeous.”

  “Oh yeah?” she said with a teasing smile. “Looking up an old flame are we, Danny?”

  I humored her with a brief chuckle. “No, I never actually knew her. She was a model married to a billionaire named Arnold Reichs, CEO of some tech firm... Thinking Kinematics, was the name. She went mis—”

  “Missing! Yes, I do remember her. That was all over the new when i
t happened. Must’ve been in, let me see...”

  “2068, two years before I left. I vaguely remember it, too, but it had nothing to do with me at the time, so I didn’t pay it much attention.”

  “And now it does have something to do with you?”

  “Oh yes. It most definitely does.”

  And I went on to explain how she went missing and how Reichs left Earth with an android replica, the case still unsolved.

  “Wow, he sounds like a real freak!” said Nikki, scrunching up her face. “I should have remembered straight away because I actually saw her... Wait, this is too weird. She auditioned for a part in The Colony, which I was in. You wanna guess what part it was for?”

  “No idea, I didn’t watch it a lot.”

  “She auditioned for the part of Five—an android on board the ISS Mayflower,” she said, watching my avatar but not seeing my face register the strange coincidence.

  “Wow...”

  “Yeah, weird right? She was a pretty well known model at the time trying to break out into acting. She didn’t get the part.”

  “I’ve heard of life imitating art, but this is ridiculous. So, did they ever find out what happened to her?”

  “Now you come to mention it I think they did. Hang on, let me check the internet,” she said, going inside to get a tablet computer.

  She sat down again, still wearing her towel and activated the tablet. The device unfolded from the size of a pack of chewing gum to a wafer-thin display seven inches across.

  “I thought the internet didn’t exist anymore?”

  “It doesn’t in the real world, but much of it was copied and emulated before the asteroid hit. We’ve been using it and growing it ever since. Now... Laetitia Reichs, right?”

  I nodded and she tapped away on the touchscreen. Her eyes scanned the page and she tapped the screen.

  “What’s it say?”

  “Laetitia Reichs Murdered. Billionaire Husband and Juno Colonist Implicated.”

  We said nothing for a few seconds and just looked at each other. I exhaled, my worst suspicions having been confirmed. She scanned the page, reading the news report.