The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

Mei Lingyilu took a sip of coffee, wiped her lips with a paper towel, and began the story.

*

Mei Feng, my great-grandfather, established the Lifechain Group, the company where he worked tirelessly to integrate blockchain technology with biotechnology. He believed this was the only path toward achieving human immortality.

Of course, he ended up building his fortune not by selling eternal life like the alchemist Xu Fu, but by providing genetic debt technology to governments. The so-called ‘genetic debt’ took debt data, modularized it into blocks and embedded the blocks into the DNA chain. The technology let debt be traced in real time and protected it from tampering. The debt data could even be genetically passed to future generations. It protected against economic collapse. The debt couldn’t be written off by suicide or modifying biosignatures. It allowed the greatest and most granular control of individuals’ economic behaviors.

By this time, precision cloning and synthetic embryo technology were no longer a hurdle. The key was now in the transfer of consciousness. If we had to re-experience life to accumulate knowledge and language every round, it would only be regarded as intergenerational alternation, not the continuation of a true individual’s life. So Mei Feng successfully developed memory storage and implantation technology. The result was a soybean-sized brain implant that could synchronize and store sensory stimulation and thought flow each second in the cloud. The implant could then be inserted into the existing hippocampal cortex to achieve seamless memory docking.

The technology triggered panic because of the possibilities it portended. It could solidify social classes, permanently enforce that ever-expanding gulf between rich and poor. Some thought it could even return our civilization to a slavery economy. After struggling against the temptation of immortality, global leaders reached the so-called Geneva Consensus, blacklisting the technology, along with large-scale biochemical and genetic weapons and atomic bombs. These technologies could no longer be used on Earth. Research and development would be subject to the most intensive scrutiny and supervision. At the same time, they didn’t want to kill off the Lifechain Group. After all, they required Lifechain’s genetic debt technology to maintain the economic system.

My great-grandfather was from the Chaoshan ethnic group. He often recalled how his ancestors never feared storms, were keen on gambling, and spread capital and culture across the world. Nothing could stop Chaoshan people from taking risks.

Therefore, as a benefit exchange, Lifechain Group took a big step in the scope of ‘self-governance’ tacitly approved by the government. On the surface, the government still maintained regulatory function, but in fact gave the Group greater freedom.

Mei Feng’s investments in asteroid mining, construction of space stations, transformation of asteroids, capital and technology weren’t too difficult. But the space mining companies all faced the same tricky issues with human resources. There weren’t enough qualified miners. Even with investments in high-paid training, demand couldn’t be met. Many businesses looked to robots, but those steel buggers required a lot of water, condensers, relays, circuits and batteries to maintain operations. Worse, they were only able to perform their more complex tasks in controlled environments.

Great-grandfather often joked that Opportunity’s geological survey of Mars took twenty years to achieve what a grad student could have knocked out in a week.

It was all a big chess game.

Lifechain Group searched for qualified candidates worldwide and signed debt contracts with them through a balance of temptation and coercion. These people sold their bodies, their genes and their souls. Biological studies show that only when mind and body are perfectly in tune can human potential be maximized. Their genetic data would be transmitted to the space station, reassembled into new genetic material, split into fertilized eggs, and developed into embryos. Their memory, after a series of procedural stimulation and reproduction, would also be encrypted like debt data and transplanted back into the cerebral cortex of the clone.

It was a brutal start on the road to achieving this, covered with more corpses and blood than you can imagine.

The Group spent ten years, tens of billions of dollars in funds and undeclared numbers of victims to finally achieve the stable operation of this new extraterrestrial economic model. In addition to precious metals and rare earth deposits, an early mining site also captured metastable helium from asteroids outside the solar system, allowing for both high energy density and renewability, which triggered a revolution in energy storage methods.

There were also unexpected disturbances, mutinies, mental breakdowns, collective slaughters. In human history, such scenes had played out countless times before when opening new frontiers. To conceal such horrors, the Group developed a method to seal up memories. Through AI, it generated a kind of ideological holy book, Treatise of Our Divine Debts, which was embedded in every miner’s cognitive module. Over the years, the Treatise grew in its spiritual influence and became a new religion.

The system worked so perfectly that years later, Earth had forgotten the existence of these people. The secret was known to only a very few. When Mei Feng died, my grandmother, Mei Li’ai, took over the company. She knew the huge political risks hidden in it and regarded it as the top secret of the group. By this time, the Lifechain Group had become an almost omnipotent force. Due to the Group, almost everyone was burdened with some form of debt.

When life becomes so complex and great, it also becomes extremely vulnerable. One slight misstep can mean enormous downfall.

Just like with every action you took in space, Mr. Dongfang Jue.

*

The weight of Mei Lingyilu’s story was so great that my instinct was to engage my cognitive module to process. Of course, it took me a few seconds to realize I would have to digest it by myself. That would take some time.

‘So we were slaves deceived into signing our own eternal deed of sale?’ I was embarrassed by the heaviness of my words but could think of no others.

‘Technically, everything you encountered up there was written into the contract. All was to the letter of the