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

time I was a media darling, especially the US media which loved the symbolism surrounding me. I was even presented with US citizenship by the First Husband. A poisoned gift in a Europe moving steadily towards virulent anti-US feeling once again.

Then came the virus, then the media backlash. Nine years old and lost in the gale of rage at my mum and dad.

I relied more and more on my paranoid nurse from Carlisle. It was she who told me, “When the US found out that England was providing arms to Western Sahara, undermining it in its Northern Africa wars, the US invaded.”

It had the pleasing rhythm of a bedtime story. The dreamlike feel of one as well.

All the bodies were buried under a comforting layer of words.

One day the nano sheet came loose and the doctors said I was as healed as I could be. They showed me my ruined back and said it was a miracle of modern medicine that I was alive, let alone with skin on my back.

They threw me in front of the media who assumed that my tears were of gratitude.

The next day a Scotsman and a Russian woman appeared in front of me. “We would like to adopt you. We would like to be your mummy and daddy, my darling. Would you like that?”

Father smiling blandly.The cameras blindly watching.

It was the first and only time she called me darling.

~~~

I held, via Mother and Father, Russian, Scottish and EU citizenships. Courtesy of the First Husband, last seen hanging from a lamp-post near the Whitehouse, I had US citizenship.

I was also part of the very small group with English citizenship, a potentially lethal affiliation, and one that caused problems during the crew selection process.

The bureaucracy functioned as it should and defaulted to whichever flag fit the system best.

People were a different matter.

I stubbornly insisted on wearing a badge with St. George’s cross on it. The little splotch of red and white tended to produce a cascade of reactions.

First, horror that someone would wear such a symbol.

Second, horror at finding out where I was from.

Finally, a strange mix of horror, sympathy and anger on my explaining who I was.

I made the crew, of course. With my connections and skillset there was no doubt I would. In true Ageless fashion, training was scheduled to take the rest of the construction and fueling phases of Unity. That was about twenty years.

We all held down high-powered jobs during this time, too. Immortal, heavily modified overachievers need plenty of outlets.

~~~

Subverting the human accessible parts of the system was the easy part.

Now we need to, in Virtual design jargon, build our project, understand our project, memorise our project.

Building is proceeding at a satisfying pace.

The 188 who refused to join us are corralled in a large blank room and left to get bored.

The twelve conspirators are engineers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, Virtual designers and myself, a monad analyst. I moonlight as a numismatist, though.

After we reveal our true purpose to the 188, we gain a few recruits including, crucially, a semiotician, along for the ride in case the Unity encountered any alien symbol sets.

“Why didn’t you ask me earlier? I would have joined willingly.”

“We wanted to keep our numbers to a minimum. You’ll be working on the deep symbolism of the structure. The team includes two Virtual designers and an architect. There’s a parallel Real team consisting of engineers and another architect.”

“Is all that design firepower really needed?”

“It’s the largest thing ever made. If we don’t get any more recruits we’ll have to start training in secondary specialties. That could take decades and I want at least a skeleton of this thing out there inside five years.”

~~~

The pre-launch parties were dull, formal affairs. The ones on the ship were worse — expensive wine and food, stilted conversation, billionaire crew sneering at guests worth mere hundreds of millions.

Launch itself was fairly spectacular. An antimatter Orion drive with AM bombs exploding against a giant kickplate to provide smooth 1g acceleration.

~~~

Now that the team’s highly skilled brain map analyst has installed and activated my leadership modifications, I’ve become more confident, I smile more often, and I see people in simpler terms than before, as components in a larger structure.

I’m one of the few who still rest at night, an hour of sleep improving my thinking the next day. It also allows me, for a few moments, to drop the itchy, eyes-too-wide leadership pose.

I’ve also been able to return to my twin loves of monad analysis — a very arcane study of the small-scale interface between Virtual and Real — and numismatics, the study of the mathematics of coins, the latest theorized objects believed to underpin space-time.

Coins of all shapes, sizes, orientation and spin fill space, their edges representing a very localised entropy measurement. Every coin is unique and distinct — or rather, their relations between each other are, coins themselves not existing except within these relations.

And yet, for all that coins are distinct and unique, they all map continuously onto each other.

~~~

Centuries into the voyage we conspirators met for the first time on the ship. It was our last chance to stop the program.

I’d guilted Mother and Father into installing the dog virus during construction.

“Short of a block-by-block deconstruction it’s invisible,” Aileen, a software engineer, assured us.

“The skeleton is built in Virtual,” I said. “Filling it out will be by far the bigger job. I’m going to need a semiotician, someone to deal with the deep symbolic structure of this thing. People won’t be able to use it if they don’t believe in it, so we need a usable symbol set, only this one needs to be larger and run deeper that anything built before. Actually, a Jungian analyst might be more useful.”

“No more weird specializations. Someone learning that would definitely attract attention. Joanne?”

Our nano specialist told us that one-third of the ship’s mass, when converted to nano, would be enough. No one liked to think too hard about what that level of conversion would look like.

Every one