“You know that they’re just psychos, right? Not geniuses. They’ve got no special talent for making the world perfect, or figuring out the future. They’re just good at game-rigging. Con artists.” She thought about her dad, school friends, their pretense to noblesse oblige and refinement. How they’d herd-mentality into some fad but pretend it was a newly discovered, ageless universal truth—not product cooked up by one of their own to sell to the rest. That was the amazing thing: they were in the business of making people feel envy and desperation over material things and exclusive experiences, but were just as susceptible to envy and desperation.
“The reason they’re so good at making us desperate and selling us shit isn’t that they’re too smart to get conned. It’s because they’re extra-susceptible. They understand how to make us turn on one another in envy and terror because they’re drowning in envy and terror of each other. My dad knows the guy in the next yacht is a bastard who’d slit his throat and steal his empire because my dad is a bastard who’d slit that guy’s throat and steal his empire. This immortality shit? That’s not about all of them living forever, it’s about just one or two living forever, being deathless emperor of time.”
“You know more about them than I ever will, Icy, but we don’t want to hoard immortality, we want to share it. To viralize it. People who know they can’t die will be better people than people who worry about the end. How could you blind yourself with short-term thinking if you’re planning life everlasting?”
All the billions who’d died. Every one the apex of a pyramid of resources, love, thoughts no one else ever thought before and would never think again. If you have it in your power to end slow-motion genocide, what kind of monster would you be not to do it? What price was too high? She knew that this was dangerous thinking, the kind people died and killed for. Tam wanted her to stop things because Tam couldn’t make herself stop things.
It was too late. Iceweasel couldn’t help herself, either.
*
When it was all said and done, there wasn’t much they wanted to take with. They broke down Dis’s cluster with her supervision; she ran a commentary on her subjective experience of the slow shutdown, retransmitted in realtime to other campuses, researchers, hobbyists, dying people, spies, and gossips. It was part of a dump of everything, all the notes and source code, optimizations and logs. It was time to uncloak. They would hit the road with a lot of fanfare.
Iceweasel filled the trike’s cargo pods with the essentials, the brain-imaging rigs and the redundant storage modules. They were on the fringes of walkaway network, and the scans they’d made were too bulky to fully mirror. Instead, they were divided up in a redundant swarm among the WU crew, everyone seeding their parts out to denser parts of walkaway as quickly as physics allowed, but for at least a day, a single well-placed strike would wipe out the only five people who had been scanned by CC with the certainty that they could be brought back to life someday.
The most difficult things to carry were the people themselves. Not just the four deadheads, but all the people. They marched in a long column through the woods towards the B&B. Iceweasel was sure she wasn’t the only one thinking about the efficiency of upload, the sweet nothing of deadheading. If they were deadheading, they wouldn’t have to play out the idiot conversion of sunlight to flora, flora to fauna, fauna to energy, energy to muscular action. They could just lie down, get stacked like cordwood on the back of the trike—they’d ended up wrapping the four deadheaders in cocoons of bubblewrap; they stuck flexible duct-tubing into the mass as it puffed up, creating fresh-air tunnels to their faces.
Better than stacking like cordwood: if they uploaded, they could fit into someone’s pocket. That person could ride a bicycle or a horse or just jog, and they’d go along with her. Someday, they would transition to beings of insubstantial information, everywhere and nowhere. Someday, they’d stop for a scan before they went out for a swim, just in case they drowned.
“Colds,” Sita said. “If we do bodies, people will use upload to shake off colds.”
“How?” Iceweasel asked from atop her trike, its gentle humming rumble numbing the insides of her thighs.
“Simple,” Sita said. “Take a scan, get a new body out of storage, decant the data into it.”
Iceweasel snorted. “Then what? Push your old body into a wood chipper?”
“It’s feedstock,” Sita said. “Put it to sleep and don’t wake it. If you’re sentimental, have it mounted. Or make a coat, or cook it for dinner.”
“You realize there’s a whole default that thinks that’s what this is about,” Iceweasel said. She’d grown certain there were spies in their midst. She spoke carefully, with the sense she was being recorded and any failure to speak out when jokes like this arose would be held against her. Tam’s talk of war crimes trials roiled in her hindbrain.
“You realize they’re exactly right,” Sita said. She smiled, stopped. “You know, when the first walkaway prostheses projects started, most of the people contributing had lost an arm or a leg in Belarus or Oman, and were tired of paying a loan shark for something that hurt and barely worked and could be remotely repossessed by an over-the-air kill-switch if they missed a payment. But once they got here and started living, realized how much had been left on the table by conservative companies that didn’t want to get into a patent fight and didn’t see any reason to add advanced functionality to something that you didn’t have any choice about, they got radicalized.
“They stopped saying ‘I just want to make an arm that’ll get through the day,’ and started saying ‘I want an arm that does everything my old arm did.’ From there, it was a short step to ‘I want an arm that’s better than my old arm.’ And from there, it was an even shorter step to ‘I want an arm that’s so outrageously awesome that you’ll cut off your own to get one.’ That’s what’s coming to immortality. Not just the ability to come back from the dead, but the ability to rethink what it means to be alive. There’s going to be people who decide to deadhead for a year or a decade, to see what’s coming. There’ll be people with broken hearts who deadhead for twenty years to get some distance from their ex. I’ll bet you that someday we’ll look around and discover that all the kids are short for their age, and it’ll turn out that they’ll all have been deadheaded by their parents whenever they had a tantrum and were missing ten percent of their realtime.”
Iceweasel shook her head. “Stuff just doesn’t change that much. Most people will be doing the same thing in twenty years they’re doing now. Maybe in one hundred years—”