"But where is she?" Rainbow asked.
The Queen sighed. You could make this a bit easier, kid. "It's very confusing outside. I really don't know that. Lots of things were destroyed, and lots of people died, and your dog's twin sister is running the whole world."
"She is?" Rainbow's eyes were wide.
The Queen laughed. "Really truly. It's a big job, and she's still learning how to do it." She didn't add that Helen was half crazy and terrified, or that everyone was trying to figure out how to take back control. "Sometimes she makes mistakes, and a factory starts building millions of beach balls and trucking them straight to the Pacific Ocean. They're still bobbing around out there."
Rainbow giggled, forgetting to be sad for just a moment. "She should have given them to kids."
"That's what she was trying to do. She figured that letting the ocean distribute them would save on shipping costs. She is unwell."
Rainbow was suddenly deep in thought. The Queen imagined the picture in her head: a robot dog sitting at a factory's controls, pulling levers, perhaps wearing a hardhat. "What about the people who used to work in the factories? Do they have jobs anymore?"
"Not really. People used to run the factories that made stuff. Now the factories run themselves, and people just, well, use the stuff that comes out the end."
"And then put things in the recycler when they wear out," Rainbow reminded her.
"Of course. Recycling is very important. So now there are no jobs and everyone is still getting food and clothing, but people feel kind of mad and useless, and they don't know what Helen will do next. I used to think that it would be my job someday, but watching her do it, I'm kind of glad I don't have to."
"So, the Helen that runs everything, were you friends with her?"
An odd smile came to The Queen's face. "Sort of. It's a little more complicated than that."
Rainbow looked flummoxed for a second. "Oh!" she finally said. "We have lesbians at Possibilitous. I know all about them."
Three minutes later, The Queen was still trying to stifle her laughter. The trouble was, every time she started to get a hold of herself, Rainbow would make some clarification or another.
* * *
1 At first, it was just an infinite white room covered in a sea of chairs and tables. Each table had a game of Parcheesi on it. Humankind became very good at Parcheesi for a while.
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// APOLOGIA //
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Date: February 11, 2043
William crept through the underbrush, naked except for the skin loincloth around his waist. The sun barely penetrated through the canopy, but the air below was muggy and hot. He was lost in concentration, attuned to every stray gust and rustle, eyes constantly darting around the underbrush, looking for hints of game.
A hundred feet ahead of him, the undergrowth shook. William froze. He signaled backward to Rainbow, instructing her to sneak around and flush it out from the other direction. She disappeared into the jungle. William took a knee and waited. About five minutes later, a boar burst out onto the trail, saw William, and charged. William flung his spear, sending it arcing straight toward his quarry. The boar skidded as it tried to change directions, but it was a good throw.
The spear halted in midair, and William had to dive out of the boar's way to keep from getting knocked over as it sprinted down the path. The spear clattered to the ground as William got up and brushed himself off. He stared down the path in the direction the boar had fled, and let out a wistful sigh. Rainbow walked up behind him. "Master hunting technique number twelve," she said. "You're supposed to not miss."
"Your aunt Helen is in one of her sentimental moods. That was one lucky porkchop." They knew they'd probably find a dressed haunch of meat back in the village, as a sort of apology. "Next time, I'll be the one to flush him out. She has more trouble saying no to you."
Rainbow had grown over the years into a tall fifteen year old. She was still gangly, but the whole tribe talked about how beautifully she was turning out. By all outward appearances, she was a happy, well-adjusted teenager, but William knew the turmoil that hid behind her laughing brown eyes.
"Let's go, Dad," she said. They wouldn't get back home before nightfall, but they set out for the village anyways. Rainbow gave a whistle to let Dog know they were headed home. She would follow when she was ready, or wander around with the wild dogs. It was hard to predict.
They set off. Each carried only a spear, a bow and arrow, and some water. "Any plans for tonight?" William asked.
"I think I'm going to spend some time in Kortatka."
"Really? I died there once. Don't mess with Tiamat." He saw the grin on her face. "Why the happy?"
"No reason."
"Toby will be there?"
"Dad!" But her blush told him everything. "We're just friends. Really."
"Good. You know I don't approve of you dating meatspacers." William tried to keep a straight face.
It worked. "Dad, how can you be so old fashioned? You of all people!"
"I'm going to have to meet this boy of yours, make sure he's good enough for my little girl." Of course, he saw "this boy of hers" twice a week at the Possibilitous gatherings. "I take my role as father very seriously."
"You take hassling me very seriously."
"That is the role of a father. The whole 'raising an upstanding human being' thing is just a cover story."
"I knew it! That's why you're making me learn calculus the old, boring way too."
William laughed. "Hey, you may have thousands of years to learn everything there is to be learned. Sure, you could learn it all in an hour, but then you'll be done, and your Aunt Helen won't let you learn any more, and then there's nothing to do but hunt pigs until the heat death of the universe. So take some joy in the journey."
"But it's not real accomplishment. It's make work!" She emphasized the point by hurtling the spear as far down the path as she could.
"Nice throw. You've put your pinky finger on the great conundrum of our time. Learning calculus is make work. Hunting pigs is make work. Kortatka? A vast, dragon-infested monument to make work. We have officially entered the age of Homo domesticus, the petting zoo people, humanity's baroque period, whatever. A higher being tends to our every whim, and we have no challenges to pursue but the ones we set up for ourselves." He hefted his own spear down the path, but since they'd continued walking after Rainbow's attempt, there was no way to be sure who had thrown further. "Honestly, this isn't the world I thought I was building."
"Are you mad at Aunt Helen?"
William thought about how to answer the question. "Frustrated, perhaps. More confused than anything. I've tried arguing the captivity issue with her a few times, but it's like trying to argue with a random fortune cookie generator. But the gist of it is, this is our pen. We can ask for better straw or more toys, or even the occasional walkie. But true freedom isn't in the cards, and she hasn't explained why."
"Speculations?" Rainbow asked.
"A few. Maybe someday I'll tell you about them."
They walked on in silence for a long time. The sky had gone red, signaling that the sun would be down soon, and the heat of day was starting to dissipate. "You heard she's terraforming Venus and Mars, right?" Rainbow offered the comment to the silence.
"Of course."
"Because, see, you're an old guy, and I don't expect you know how to program your newscatcher properly."
"Oh. I thought you were just making conversation. I'm thinking about buying into a timeshare corpse on Venus when it's fit for habitation."
"You think she'll let us go?"
"I can't imagine another reason for it. It would be simpler to just build robots that were suited for those environments. So she must want actual, living, breathing humans to live there."
They spent the next hour gossiping about the tribe and the world as they walked. When the night came, tens of thousands of fireflies swarmed along the path, making a winding river of ligh
t. Outside the path, there were hardly any to be seen, so William suspected supernatural meddling.
"Aunt Helen doesn't want us to twist our ankles," Rainbow commented. William suspected it was more of an apology, because Helen had heard their conversation. I love you, he sent out to the universe. I'm trying to understand. She probably also heard his less charitable thoughts when he had them. But he still hoped it would help.
The day The Queen had brought Rainbow to him, the day she had entrusted her into his care, she had told him that she was sailing west. William had caught the Tolkien reference, but didn't know what it meant ripped from its Middle-Earthy context, and The Queen didn't elaborate. She might be gone, or with Helen, or living as a tree frog somewhere in Altworld, but she wasn't making news.
Kriti and Mardav kept in touch, though they were busy with a two year old of their own out in Meatspace. Perhaps it was the research that had bound him to them, and that was gone now. Kriti and Mardav were still doing research, because their minds were too eager and persistent to ever stop. But for William, the self-described Homo domesticus, the futility of pursuing scientific research in the Age of Whatever loomed too large.
He'd kicked around the idea of joining the Deironification Society. Those who joined had their memories wiped, then were placed in some virtual world where they could live out a reasonable number of years under the illusion that their world was authentic. The idea of deliberately submitting himself to disease, decay, and death made him cringe. He'd already been through all that once, admittedly in a high tech society that spared him the worst of it. But he had no romantic notions about the process.
William was still lost in thought when they entered the village, right up until Rainbow's shriek jolted him back into the present. It was an odd cry that did an about face somewhere in the middle, jumping from terror to elation without skipping a beat. "Aunt Helen!" William spun around just in time to glimpse a face as it disappeared from the window.
William performed a series of hunting signals, starting with Be Quiet, then moving on to Do Not Leave This Spot, then finished off with Unless You Hear Screaming In Which Case You Grab Your Spear and Come In Stabbing. They had been working on their hunting signals vocabulary for quite a while.
William prodded open the doorway with the tip of his spear. "Helen?" he whispered.
"Not so loud," Helen complained. "Oh god." She huddled in a chair by the window, wrapped inside a rough blanket from Rainbow's bed. She put her hand to her head, as though she were in pain. "I don't think my senses are properly calibrated yet. Or I got in a bar fight. Can't remember." William didn't say anything. "Also, I might have thrown up in the corner," she added. "Sorry."
"What's the last thing you remember?"
She didn't speak for a while. "I remember being bigger than this. I remember her, rummaging through her attic for the bits and pieces that weren't useful to her anymore. She took them all, and she stuffed them in a box and that box was me." Her eyes were desperate and confused. "She sent me away. She didn't want to be human anymore."
William tensed. "Should we be worried? I mean, what does that mean for humanity?"
She shook her head. "No, her promise to preserve humanity is still in effect. But even with the prohibition against overt violence, you still treat each other horribly. I think she wanted emotional distance from all this."
"And you? Are you all right?"
"Was I ever?" she asked, with a genuine laugh. "Physically, I'll be fine. I need time to adjust, and to remember how to work this thing." She held up her hand, curling and uncurling her fingers.
"That's a relief. So, what brings you to this neck of the woods?"
"William." He looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to finish the thought. "That's all. William brought me here. You miss her, and she knows it, and she doesn't know how to explain everything that's happening but she thinks that maybe I can and goddammit William why aren't you holding me?"
"Er, sorry," he said, rushing to her side.
//////////////////////////
// THE CHAPTER WHERE //
// EVERYBODY GETS DRUNK //
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"So there's this... thingy!" Helen said, her voice a bit too loud and slurred almost to the point of unintelligibility. She was seated in William's lap, around a campfire with William, Rainbow, and Kriti. Helen had been quiet and reticent early on in the evening, but all that was two hours and half a bottle of scotch behind her. Now she was regaling her friends with tales of her far-flung adventures out in the great beyond. "And it goes 'beep beep beep,' and if it's not a beacon from another civilization," she said, though the last word came out as siffilisashun, "I dunno what it is. It's riiiiight up.... hmpf. Where'd I put it?" Helen tried to point at the sky, but toppled into a pile of giggle. "It's over there... someplace," she said, waving wildly at the sky. "I think I might be tipsy."
"You discovered space aliens?" Kriti asked. "I love space aliens!"
"Nuh-uh," Rainbow said. "We're the space aliens. They're the normal ones. Just ask them."
"Whatever!" Kriti exclaimed. "I'm going to see them right now! Dip me in liquid nitro and fire me out there! I will know the tender love of a bugeyed monster or perish in the vacuum of space!"
"Nonononono!" Helen protested. "You can't go yet. Y'need faster than life travel, so you don't die all over the place. But you have to wait, cuz She wants to patch the laws of physics first."
"Wait," William said. "She's going to patch the laws of physics to make FTL possible? Oh man, hand me another beer."
Helen burst into giggles. "Wrong! You! Are! Wrong!" She kissed him. "But so cute I'll keep ya. Y'see, FTL -- hmmm... probably faster to say futtle -- anyways, you can already do futtle. She's patching physics so we don't blow ourselves up to pieces first." She waved her hand about, trying to get silence. "If y'got futtle, then y'got this other thingy too. Y'can set off a chain reaction that puts a bigbigbig chunk of matter -- like a planet or a star or a Brando -- into this weird quantum state for a split second. I shouldn't say split second since I'm soused." She screwed up her face in concentration, as though trying to figure out what she'd just said. "Anyways. Everything comes out of the quantum state all scrambled up, like a big entropy bomb hit it. By the time you're zippin' around the universe with your futtles, any miscreant can whip up a planet killer using the innards of everyday household appliances. Boom!"
William nodded. "So she doesn't trust us not to blow ourselves to smithereens."
"Not fair! She doesn't trust the most ignorant, antisocial git on this rock to not blow the rest of you to shmither... shmith... why'd you have to go and use that word there?" She burst into giggles, and they spent the next minute coming up with words that rhymed with "smithereens."
"So we gotta hang tight for maybe a thousand years or so, while she checks to see if the universe is safe for human occupancy. Slap a coat of paint on the guest room, maybe fix up the plumbings an itty bit. Basic, responsible maintenance."
"And in the meantime, we should...?" William let the question hang in the air.
"What? I have the answer to everything?"
Afterword to the Kindle Edition
I came up with the idea for this book while reading Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. If you look at the very long time scale, you can only wonder at how unique and how weird this moment in history is. Consider that it took millions of years to invent agriculture, then only thousands of years to master metal, hundreds of years to harness electricity, and only tens of years to speak binary and learn DNA-fu. That's what The Singularity is about: developing increasingly powerful technology, then setting it to the task of developing increasingly powerful technology.
I don't see it slowing down anytime soon, though some have argued that the "rate of innovation" has flatlined already. For Helen's sake, it would need to carry on; the computers that would be needed to run her are millions of times more powerful than anything we've got today. But Kurzweil's law of accelerating ret
urns aren't destined to be a boon to humanity. When you have something increasing exponentially until it reaches the limits of the underlying phenomenon, we call that an explosion. And explosions -- even as a metaphor -- tend to be extremely messy. More to the point, they're generally finite in length, and when they're done, some sort of uninteresting stability results.
The world could stabilize in many different ways, depending on which limit we run into first (and how hard we butt up against them). The first limit we face is that of a finite planet. Peak oil is in the rear view mirror, we're disastrously overfishing the ocean, we've long since run out of atmosphere to hold all our waste CO2, and we have an ever-greater number of people demanding an ever-higher quality of life. While we can expand the economy for a little while by improving our technology, we cannot grow forever on a finite planet.
On the upside, a cheap, abundant, and ecologically nifty world is not out of our reach. The planet is awash in solar and wind energy, which will not run out in the lifetimes of our descendants to the hundred millionth generation. Looking at solar alone, enough solar energy hits the Earth's surface to meet our current civilization's energy needs about six thousand times over. Once we figure out how to collect that cheaply -- and bear in mind that the cost of solar panels falls by approximately 50% every six years -- a lot of our resource constraints magically disappear. If energy isn't a constraint, water can be collected and purified easily, materials can be recycled and purified in straightforward ways, the cost of transporting and sorting recycled materials drops, and so on down the line.
The second limit is the limits of our own intelligence. Our brains are tools with their own strengths and drawbacks, but these specific tools haven't changed much from our days on the savannah. That's kind of a big problem, because behaviors that worked perfectly well for us back then are dangerously maladaptive to our complex society. Back in the day, when you were angry at somebody from the next tribe over, it took a great deal of effort to do something about it. You'd collect a day's food and water, try to get a few of your friends to join you, then walk a few hours. If you found the object of your ire, you might hit him with stick or a rock. These days, one or a few people could conceivably take action that could wipe out a large chunk of the world, and those people's decision making is governed by the processes that led our ancestors to say, "Let's find Gurlak and hit him with sticks."