Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever by Phoenix Sullivan (easy readers txt) 📕

“We lose what’s left of our humanity, yes. We gain by becoming places.”

~~~

The voice reached fifteen when the wave of destruction hit us with an unbearable roar and a rain of concrete dust.

I heard one of the soldiers praying and I joined him.

Eventually the wave passed and none of us was buried under rubble.

After seeing to their own.the soldiers cut my clothes off and rolled me onto a precious mat of nano that cleaned, sterilised and attempted to heal my burns.

They put in an IV then turned to their EMP-hardened comms equipment to find out what had happened.

At no point did they look outside, even through their periscope.

The US troops slid easily into their damage control routines, improvisation and planning melding perfectly to get themselves onto the medevac chopper. Amazingly they took me with them.

“Amazingly” because I briefly saw what was outside.

The carbon fiber walls had blown away in the blast leaving an uninterrupted landscape of horror over the already bleak Yorkshire moor.

~~~

When I saw Mother’s designs I was almost awed. Her skills had never before been so apparent.

“Spinning drums along a central axis. Engines at one end, a large micro-gravity life-dome at the other. The whole capable of surviving 1g axial acceleration during speed-up and slow-down phases and artificial 0.8g rotational acceleration during cruise.”

She glanced at me to make sure I was paying attention.

“This is all basic, given design. I work to fill in gaps.”

We were in her work area, a riot of British stained glass and Russian icons. She herself had ancestry far east of those icon makers, demonstrated in her small stature and gentle Asian features, incongruously topped with a shocking cloud of Auburn hair.

“The drum produces 0.8g , same as at the surface of the Destination. We run triple helices down drums with cabins, storage and recreation off these loops, with different routes between them available. Mystery in familiarity.”

She built upon this mystery, allowing efficiency at all turns, but always in comfortably enigmatic ways. I could see how she would take all this technological sophistication and force it into some deep template we all carry.

Or rather, not force. Both technology and template were based on the same physical substrate after all. Couldn’t they be mapped onto each other? At some level couldn’t a complex neuronal tangle map continuously onto a more direct application of physics.

The answer is no, of course. To map like that, a common symbolic underpinning is required.

~~~

The transformation takes two hours. We all sleep through it, seeming to wake as normal in our normal ship. To my horror it is still fucking cold.

Most of us immediately punch up Real and shift our viewpoint out ten kilometers. Our beautiful dragonfly is now a seething needle of sparkling gray fifty kilometers long. The dome-shaped ablation shield of asteroid ice is being eaten. There’s no longer any need for it.

“Doesn’t feel too bad, does it?” I say to Stoney.

“No. But being a Virtual I could make it feel bad.”

“Do you have to be so negative?”

“Yes. I actually understand that we are really dead.”

We are in a copy of the Jules Verne stateroom, a place my parents hated and which nearly finished their marriage.

It’s warm in here now; I’ve made it that way. Mars is visible out of the window.

“You think the colony is still there?” asks Stoney.

“We haven’t heard from them in centuries. They had a very shallow, unstable ecosystem.”

“I guess they’re gone. I’d like to think the Hellas Sea is there, though.”

He’s avoiding the issue. I stand beside him at the window holding the cold brass railing in un-mittened hands for the first time in millennia.

“We’re all over three thousand years old, Stoney. We’re insane. We play games that last centuries. We devise forms of sexuality like fashions in clothes. We have excess memories scraped from us annually like barnacles from a wooden ship.”

He looks at me, the image of his face distorted in the rail.

“We are now Virtual beings and this could break us like nothing before. Unity doesn’t care about us now. We’re toys. It could populate the Destination using stored templates without us. Better without us, in fact. No demi-gods strolling around fouling things up.”

“So what now?”

I allow the Virtual engines to increase the airship’s velocity. The red desolation outside moves past more swiftly and the background roar becomes louder.

“We carry through the plan, OK?”

“Ninety percent of the crew won’t agree.”

“It’s the only way we’ll survive, even in Virtual. We have 1900 years to go. In our present state we’ll not exist at the end, except as happy little routines in Unity.”

~~~

Burned and burning bodies were everywhere. Most of the living were dying. Some, who had been facing the blast, had no eyes. Many had flesh burned to the bone. There were none of those famous shadows; we had been too far from the blast for such merciful vapourisation. Instead we had a world of meat: some dead, some living; some crispy black, some bubbling red; some cut clean by flying carbon fiber, some with burned ragged holes.

Over it all, over the burned limestone pavement covered in flesh, floated a low moaning from many throats. A ragged song of pain and sadness and rage.

And, amazingly again, the soldiers, who surely knew who I was, didn’t leave me there.

~~~

Ship design and construction carried on through my adolescence and beyond.

My parents worked continuously, handing me over to child-care collective after child-care collective. The requirements shifted with my age and educational level, each set of metrics recorded in a continuously updated document controlled and monitored by Det Norsk Veritas.

I hung out in alleys with friends and smoked bad weed.

I spent a week in Copenhagen on a field trip and smoked good weed. The next day I was introduced to drugs that had an even greater effect on my neurotransmitters. I liked those, and returned to Tallin with some interesting addictions.

DNV noticed this.

~~~

We can’t start the mutiny until we subvert almost every system on the ship. Unity must know what we are doing but is staying