Methuselah

Chapter 1

Call me Methuselah. It’s not the name I was born with, but ems rarely use their names anyway, and this one seems appropriate since, the way I figure it, I am 969 years old. Of course, that’s subjective time. Between near-light speed travel and variable emulation speeds—most of the time, for interstellar travel, I’m barely running—it’s hard to keep track of real time. And not too meaningful, anyway—how old would I be if I were still in my human body on Earth today, well that depends on how you figure out today, and a year doesn’t have much meaning away from Earth. Whatever my age might be, I have decided to start this journal to record my thoughts for posterity.

In a way, it is strange to think of so much time passing. The millennium before my birth saw so much change—the Renaissance, the First Age of Exploration, the Industrial and Information Revolutions, space travel, and the beginning of the Second Age of Exploration. How could anyone have coped with all that in a single lifetime? It seemed like it would continue that way forever, with quantum computing and full brain emulation avoiding the limitation of natural human lifetimes, yet despite all the predictions of a singularity, it stopped. Or at least slowed down, human knowledge and capabilities no longer constantly accelerating. Sure there is always innovation in consumer products—tastes change as quickly as ever. But the big technology leaps are rare now. Some say it’s the challenge of communication. The Cognitive Revolution came about because of language, the Agricultural Revolution came with writing, the Industrial and Information Revolutions had so many communication technologies pushing it along. But once we hit the limits of what you could discover or invent within a planet, growing further didn’t seem to help. At least until someone invents faster than light communication.

Maybe that’s for the best, though. At least humans can travel from system to system and adapt easily enough when they get there, even though centuries will have passed. If every visit to a different planet caused a culture shock like the first Europeans reaching America, interstellar travel would be much less common than it is, when it is no worse than hopping between countries on a jet plane. Worse, what would happen to me if my emulation technology went obsolete too quickly, or if massive artificial intelligence became practical? Us long-lived ems have definitely relied on the slowdown of technological growth.

My life on Earth was nothing special. I was an engineer, having a small role developing control systems for various space programs. I even got to travel for two years on one of the early missions to the outer planets, passing by Saturn’s rings. Few people are actually awake for that long when traveling through space now, preferring to spend as much time as possible in suspended animation to limit the aging process, but some still stay out of the pods for in-system trips. As I passed 70—still actively working and barely beginning to feel the effects of age—I was diagnosed with cancer. So many forms had been eliminated thanks to genetic engineering, and human life spans had increased to nearly 200 years, but, alas, mine was one that resisted both prevention and cure. Perhaps there’s a cure by now; I haven’t thought to check, and of course it doesn’t really matter for me anymore. But luckily, full brain emulation was becoming viable, and I quickly signed up before the disease affected my mental capacity. With a complete scan of my neural connections loaded in a computer, I assisted in finalizing the systems for this very ship, the Starship Hispaniola, and I have been head ship’s engineer ever since. I don’t know what happened to my original body, either; he (I?) may not have survived the scan, but if he did, he should have expected several more years before the cancer finally killed him, yet he never came around to visit me. I can’t blame him, though; if I knew I was about to die I wouldn’t want to see a clone of myself that would outlive me. (And since he was me, he probably felt the same way.) Or maybe he just wanted to avoid making me feel uncomfortable, seeing my old body in decay and unable to do anything about it. Whatever the reason, I soon left Earth behind. And here I am now, several voyages later, traveling from New Jupiter to Olympia, and apparently in a very philosophical mood.

Chapter 2

Sybil sat at her terminal, chatting with a guardian em. Unsurprisingly, breaking into this computer system wasn’t any harder than it would have been with an actual human. A few kind words, a maiden in distress sob story, promises she would never keep. One way or another she would get through into the secure archives of Greco-Delphi Building Group and find what she wanted.

What’s your name? the guardian asked.

Maryanne Burton, Sybil lied.

You called in sick this morning....

Yes, that’s why I need remote access, so I can keep working on Project Elsinore until I am well enough to come into the office. You know how urgent that is for Brett. The board keeps asking him when it’s going to be ready to go.

Yeah, but you really should be resting.

I know, I know.... I just had some ideas and had to try them out before I lost them.

Are you on a secure terminal?

Yes, go ahead and do a scan. Sybil had taken great pains to make sure her hardware modifications wouldn’t show up on a remote scan, and she had successfully passed many before. This time, she had gone so far as to have her own terminal masquerade as Greco-Delphi’s standard configuration. All the extra quantum CPUs, the safedisk interface, and her other customizations were safely hidden behind hardware firewalls and wouldn’t be detectable remotely until she was ready to activate them.

Why don’t you have your secretary em take care of this for you, while you get more rest?

Well, I don’t like to badmouth my coworkers, human or em, but the secretary.... I just can’t trust her. She’s just dumb. Even at high emulation speed, and I hate to waste cycles on someone like that. Last week she was supposed to arrange some meetings for me with Infiniti executives. But when I arrived they were still in their ship, not even out of suspension. Of course, Sybil had something to do with that, transferring an em on board under cover of providing maintenance updates, then using it to reprogram their suspension pods as they approached orbit. So I had to go up the elevator myself. And of course, Sybil had something to do with the malfunctioning antiviral filter on the space elevator cabin, which led to Maryanne being sick. Nothing too serious, but the illness was rare enough now to not have an easily available cure, so Maryanne would be stuck home for a couple days and Sybil could impersonate her safely. She had put a lot of work into setting up this run. Can you believe that? What a waste of time. Surely you heard about that?

Yeah, I know she felt bad about that. She didn’t know what went wrong.

That’s what I’m saying! She doesn’t even know what she does wrong! Now, please don’t say anything to her about this. But you understand why I’m eager to take care of this myself.

Yeah, I understand. Your scan looks good. I’ll need biometric confirmation now.

Sybil quickly patched in the retinal data she had also picked up when Maryanne had been in the elevator car and timed it just right so it would look like it was coming from her normal biometric reader.

Thank you, Maryanne. I’ll give you access for one hour, then you’ll need to be reauthorized by another guardian. Feel better soon.

Thanks. One hour would be more than enough for what Sybil had in mind. I’ll remember this next time I hear about cycle upgrades. And that’s how it was done—not promising too much, or he might start to suspect he was doing something improper, just enough to make him feel good about himself.

With access to the Elsinore files, Sybil linked in her quantum decryptor and cranked CPU power up to max, much higher than the scan would have allowed. Fully powered, her terminal could support multiple ems running at human speed, but ems couldn’t hide physical hardware or bypass security measures nearly as efficiently as a human could. It was ironic that the guardian wouldn’t have even given them a chance but was less suspicious about a human. Myths about artificial intelligence capabilities still carried a lot of weight in the human (and em) psyche; fears that they would soon render humans obsolete had been the core of many popular entertainments back when humanity was confined to one planet but still persisted even now. Her terminal could also be used as a Universal BitCoin miner, and it would be one of the best on the planet if she used it for that, but for this gig she would end up with 100 times the UBC that she would get if she put the same energy into mining, and besides, that would be boring.

And Sybil did not like boring. Boring was like her classes, which she had stopped paying attention to when she was 13. At first this was noticed, and she nearly had the truancy police coming to talk to her parents, but then she completed her first hack, diverting a delivery of something—she never knew or cared what—to someone—again, she didn’t know exactly whom—in exchange for what seemed like a huge sum to a teenager. Maybe not so huge now, but it was enough to upgrade her terminal and load an em who could follow her classes for her. After that, life was rarely boring. Once she graduated, she started hopping from one planetary system to another, staying only long enough to learn the latest local technology, find the biggest target, make the hack, and move on. Sometimes, as now, the targets were selected for her, often by a rival corporation. But too much of that would get boring, so she was careful to mix it up, and she only signed on for the corporate gigs that offered some challenge.

Boring could also describe her apartment, undecorated and sparsely furnished. But she spent so little time there and hated the idea of wasting time at the printer to fill up a room she would just be leaving soon, and the only thing she took with her between systems was her terminal. When she wasn’t sleeping (and she didn’t much care what her room looked like when she was sleeping) she was at her terminal—occasionally wearing glasses, but mostly she preferred the old fashioned interface—or she was outside running. She always chose housing with easy access to good running routes. Not only did it keep her fresh and in good physical condition, but it also gave her visibility into the physical environment, a perspective she couldn’t get from her terminal no matter what virtual reality interface she used, and that often helped her line up her marks.

After twenty minutes, the files were downloaded, decrypted, and stored in Sybil’s safedisk. Infiniti Enterprises would get the data gradually over the next month, with Sybil’s account balance growing over the same amount of time. Unless, of course, Greco-Delphi Consolidated offered her more. Sybil grinned. Blackmail really wasn’t her thing, though. Too dangerous, too easy to get caught, as she learned back on Madine, the one time she had tried it. She shook her head at the memory of how close she had come to being apprehended there. Still, Infiniti might have some data that Greco-Delphi would like to have, and if she wanted to she could help them enough to counteract the loss she was causing them now. She had played both sides of the game more than once, on this planet and others.

But probably not again here on Olympia. By a month from now, when the data transfer was complete, she would be moving on. Stay too long in one place and you were bound to make a mistake, have someone track you down. She was about to get up from her terminal when she noticed a new incoming message. It was marked interstellar—there must have been a courier ship that had docked recently, delivering messages from other systems that were too large or not urgent enough to send via beam. The sender was identified as Phoenix—the name didn’t mean anything to her, but so many people used pseudonyms in her business she would have been surprised if it had. The contents were quantum signed, so whoever this Phoenix was, he really didn’t want anyone to be snooping on it; that meant it was a job. She was a little nervous that her reputation had gone far enough that someone out there would contact her. It was definitely time to get to a new system; if clients were tracking her, then agencies could be too. It took her a minute to gather the certificates and unwrap the content, but when she did, her head flew back in shock.

She was convinced this was a prank. Or a setup. The fee she was being offered was outrageous—she thought out of this world and snickered at how literal it was. Even the advance nearly matched what she would be getting from Infiniti. That would tell her if this was for real. If the Universal BitCoin blockchain checked out, then it wasn’t just a prank; cash is cash. And she couldn’t imagine an agency offering this much as a honeypot; it was enough to snare even the most straight-laced hacker into going to the dark side, much more than would be needed to tempt her or any other real target.

If it’s real, I guess I’m staying here a bit longer after all, she said out loud, still shaking her head at the thought.

Chapter 3

What happened to the birds?

Shh! The birds are smarter than you!

Herne knew what this meant, when all the birds went silent. Some perched a hundred feet up on the canyon ridge, others circled overhead, a few even sat in the scrub brush nearby, but not a single one was making a sound. They could sense it, the slight disturbance in the air, the shift in light patterns that could only be noticed against the background of the earth. He and his hunting partner Jack sat still on their mounts as they waited for their prey to appear. Finally, they saw it, as the allosaurus jumped out from around the cliff and started to run toward them, sensing only the stegosaurus and triceratops and ignoring the small mammals riding on top of them.

Go! Herne pulled on the reins and his trike veered left, trying to draw the theropod’s attention. Jack turned his steg right; there was no way he could outrun the allosaurus, but if he did this right, he wouldn’t have to. The ferns shook as the allosaurus roared; its ambush had failed, and it had to choose which prey to pursue. Herne glanced over his shoulder, hoping to see it chasing him, but instead saw it whip around and follow Jack.

Damn noob! I told him to pick a ceratops! Herne circled around, hoping he’d be able to catch the carnivore in time, not sure what he’d do when he got there. If he’d had a gun, it would be easy, but that would miss the point of the hunt. If he had a couple hydrogen bombs he could wipe out all the dinosaurs, just as the Chicxulub meteor had done on Earth—such a tragedy. No, he wouldn’t need the technology advantage, and while some of the other guides would bring a gun just in case, Herne refused to on principle. Go, Allison! he cried, as he tried to spur his trike even faster. The allosaurus pulled alongside Jack’s steg, jumping over the spiked tail that tried to knock it off its feet.

Jack! Jump! Not intuitive, for sure. Who