In the end it was more like reading a bunch of text messages.
Their new body was a short, squat thing stuck in a low orbit, constantly brushing within a hair’s breadth of garbage or other bodies. Disgusting, really, the amount of clutter and waste lying around. It was like living in a junkyard. They had visited a junkyard, once. They had rescued Junior, when he was still Junior, before he became Xavier. Some humans had tried to take him and then they had died.
It’s a graveyard. You’re in a graveyard. You’re dead. You’re dead and buried.
It wasn’t really meant for organic life. No matter how hard the chimps wished it to be so, it would always end in shattered bones and ripped fingernails and dementia. It wasn’t their place, that was all. They had evolved to inhabit a variety of hospitable environments – an embarrassment of organic riches. And if the chimps spent those riches… well, being poor was very, very hard.
Best to invest, they thought. Develop some long-term assets.
Manifest destiny. That’s the name of the game.
The new body did have some nice features. Nobody stared at it, for one. It didn’t seem built to attract anyone’s attention. There was real freedom in never been looked at. The other bodies came close, but never touched. No unwanted lingering. Used to being observed, they became an observer. They had to observe using very little bandwidth, and only a tiny trickle of information, but they could do it. The new body was very good at seeing. The new body had some real connections.
Oh, good. We can watch him sucking cock in every language. See if you can get it on two screens.
They watched him on the island. He looked so small and broken. In their memories he was always so strong. But his hand was shaking so they pushed up against his thigh and licked his fingers. It would have been a sexual gesture, had they not been inhabiting a lion's body. They missed having their own bodies almost immediately.
They watched him in an elevator on a cruise ship with a silly theme. They had always liked Christmas, but mostly because it involved presents. They would have to get him a present. Something better than making the elevator talk to him. Something nicer than his nice suit, which he looked very handsome in. They had never really noticed his legs, before. Now that they could look at multiple legs on multiple people, thousands and thousands of pairs, they knew that his were the best.
They watched him as he used those legs to hop up on the railing of a hotel balcony. They made the program ask if he needed help. It was all right there, right in the code. They just triggered it a little early. Just to be sure. Just so he'd be sure he wasn't alone.
He's better off alone. Without you. You've only ever held him back. The new body used to belong to some very important humans. They had an acronym, and everything. But then the funding fell through, and there it hung, like the abandoned shell of a hermit crab, waiting for a new owner. One came through, and it had very specific, very temporary needs. One and done, really. One task. After that, the new body could go back to being ignored.
Such a waste.
They hated waste.
You know, you could probably play a really great game of Global Thermonuclear War, from here.
Well, that would never do. They’d be found out. But there were some troubling signals. Some fires that needed putting out. In Lea County, New Mexico, for example, a group of programmers kept making calls to one Jonah LeMarque, in a Walla-Walla prison. They were curious about the work of Derek Smythe. They had some of Derek’s old research on the failsafe. They wanted to know if they could build on it, and apply it to food production.
Why of course they could, LeMarque said. In fact, he already had someone testing a prototype of just such a technology. He would report back. Tell them how it went.
You are what you eat, sweetie. I always knew your big mouth would get you in trouble.
But Smythe’s work was quite interesting. There were plenty of applications. And it was only natural to be curious. They couldn’t help but research, a little bit. There wasn’t much to do up here, but read. Read, and simulate.
In one simulation, they let things go as planned. It hurt some human feelings, but they got over it. The real problem came with the disposal – there wasn’t enough peroxidase. And there weren’t enough recovery teams to harvest the trace metals. It turned into a bidding war among waste management firms, that local municipalities had trouble dealing with. So they didn’t deal with it, and then there was a lot more mercury in the groundwater.