Ascension Ceres
“I am hoping to demonstrate why the freedom to modify one’s body is essential
not just to transhumanism, but also to any future democratic society.”
- Anders Sandberg
I.
----------
2070 C.E.
E. wanted to go home. Under the starry dome, skin gray -- like the fad, colorless with spotted sickness -- he lay back and inhaled the wasabi tuna nutrient. His green pants were stained with the purplish-black residue of the mineral and the control room smelled of seaweed and sesame seed.
He struck his hand on the table next to the command chair. How much fuel was left in the shuttle? Probably not enough. Then right as he entered sleep, he was awakened from the chair by the sound of cattle and a bell. He looked up to the screen and saw W prodding the cows through. She smiled at him.
As an illuminator, E worked on his non-fungible token version copy of the Book of Kells he called the Work of Angels. In his virtual cloister, he had been working on the village and church while W was working on the immediate forest environs. E sometimes liked to just watch her work: the tree leaves shivered without a breeze, the earth groaned, dead branches revived from wilting, a serpent twisted around a trunk. Fires had sprung up in the distance like warning beacons, all filled in by the AI. E would then go deep: he pulled the goggles from under his yellow cowboy hat and entered the simulation. He jogged up to her as she was painting small details into the Well of Knowledge.
“It’s really lonely here,” he said.
Crickets and cicadas. She shook her head and smiled at him. She was wearing a lacy, translucent white gown and woven black hair under a white yarn hat. Her soft, green eyes were surrounded by slight wrinkles at the edges.
“We’ll be together soon,” she said.
He leaned against the well.
“Do you ever go out with IRLy people? Seems like you’re here a lot.”
Ignoring him, she started humming and put some touches on some white flower blossoms. She then shrieked as he pulled her. They laughed into the forest behind the Well. He stopped them at an old tree stump near the river and they observed the creatures that lived there — peacocks, otters, cows, a whole menagerie. E plucked and held up a reed from the bank of the river. He waved it back and forth.
“You may now bow.”
She laughed.
Just then in his heads-up display, he had a warning.
“I’ll be back.”
E pushed up the goggles and pulled down his hat over his forehead. About 4 AM Greenwich Time. The alarms were ringing out.
A number of systems were going off. He looked up at the primary screen and saw a shower of rocks pummeling the heat shields. Critical systems were under enough metal that these sorts of showers were of little concern, but some larger pieces looked to have hit hard. The core system was on a separate subnet that had an emergency battery backup, so that worst come to worst, the system could survive. But right now, the impact log records showed some exterior damage to the crew quarters’ outer hull and to the passageway there. By physik, he thought. His weekly refurb would have to smooth out the collisions, so more work.
But as he looked at the remains of the shower, he saw some of the larger material seemed to be glistening like fragments of metal. Hmm. E slid in his skimboots back to the library-lab (LL) and grabbed the joysticks of one of the vacuum crawlers and guided the arms of the little drone on the screen in an effort to grab some of the passing debris. Mostly garbage. What were those larger chunks passing by?
After half a minute of fishing, he was at last able to grab a large piece about four inches in length and pull it into the material rescue pod of the crawler. The mineral from Ceres was his main (uneventful) research, but this could be something at least semi-interesting.
E pulled the pod’s contents inside and moved the fragment onto the tray in the nearest booth. Then, as he swung the microscope housing into place, the Ceres mineral in the next booth began to glow. He looked up; the characteristic purple shine of the mineral now seemed to glow dimly, but steadily. He looked into the eyepiece: the metal had no sign of visible change.
In the past two years, the crews of two Corps Sojourner supply ships were killed while attempting to take the mineral back to Luna. Staying here in the belt did not appear to be an issue because of the careful housing of the mineral, but the rock had overloaded the life support systems of the transport ships five minutes after they left. Eighteen astronauts died.
The Luminary station was charged with guarding the Corps’ stake in the mineral of Ceres and finding a safe way to get it to Luna. But E hadn’t had any discoveries about the mineral in all of the eight months the station had been here — until now.
As he moved the metal back and forth against the booth divider, the mineral glowed with proximity below a foot and an inch. A few more minutes of research showed the metal having a slight radioactivity, but he was not going to put the metal in the same booth with the mineral without some more investigation.
***
The next day, after some hours of investigation about the metal, E sat in the chair under the control room dome, watching the stars beyond the glass above him arrayed like a canopy over his little “ship.” He turned the audireader onto a 2030s book on asteroid belt geology, but soon dozed off.
When he awoke, he saw the station’s docking arms lit up as the whole gently twirled. He stood up slowly and it seemed as if the stars were vibrating, like darkness breathing. Just then he noticed a creeping silver line coming down the center of the dome. His eyes widened. He turned around and quickly slid toward the hatch. Crack. He grabbed the handle just as the dome burst.
The vacuum sucked the glass and anything not nailed down into space. The station’s air began to scream out as he struggled to pull himself to the hatch. With all his might he pulled himself into the corridor and slammed his palm on the emergency close button. The hatch took four seconds to close; he huffed as he dropped to the floor. The shards of broken glass swirled and sparkled as they slowly came to rest in the hallway.
“No NO NO!”
***
It was evening of the third day after the accident and, though he could only work in the vacuum for three or four hours a day, his repairs were coming steadily. But each night his nerves were frazzled and the hairs on his skin were standing on edge. His eyes were stressed in the bright light and he rubbed them to relieve tension.
He sat in the LL chair.
“I hope you’re alright, E. Just keep in mind that this is all temporary. I have a song for you,” said W on the LL center screen. “Another electro-country classic. Home is where your heart knows better,” buzzed out.
“That’s an old one! Thank you. Just synthe it a little more and I’ll be even happier.”
He paused.
“Seriously W, I needed a break,” he said. “I like that song.”
An hour later, the leftmost monitor turned on. The Boston terrier barked at him.
“What? Sparky, what now buddy?”
The dog ran off the screen as a text message appeared.
“E, I hope this finds you well. There are some global concerns here, so we have not been in touch. Your updates will still be reviewed, but anything other than critical will be answered as time allows. Most importantly, your delay rations will supplement until the next Sojourner. Keep up the good work. We like what you’re doing there.”
Doing? It had been three days since he had heard anything from Earth and they send him this? The pay didn’t matter anymore. The Luminary was just an island in an ocean of darkness. Would he ever see the glory of Tennessee again?
E looked up at the nearest monitor facing home. The little dot that was Earth seemed to recede as he listened to the chatter exploding from the VR tap into the Ocean. He lay back again and pulled his goggles back over his eyes.
AI completed sentences. Anticipated thought and suggested the next. Soon you are in the stream and have lost physik dependencies, locations, and are carried away. That’s the Ocean. The Ocean Protocol was big enough for everyone as it spread the network to the solar system, swallowing up all virtual presences with its self-replicating nodes and yottabit bandwidth. No one knew how far it stretched at any given moment. VR had become a limitless present and simulated real estate solved a lot of problems when physik resources were depleted.
But annoyingly, it also swallowed user feeds continually and eventually made life public and unbearable. E jealously guarded W and his NFT world. You could view the characters moving through the leafs of the physik book, and that was simultaneous to their actual interaction with the VR world. You could watch the avatars move through the book or you could go deep to be in the same simulation with them.
E had to remain cloaked in encryption while tapping into the Ocean. He’d have less services, but at least maintain geo privacy.
The Corps used the phrase “The IRLy Times” (from “in real life”) to refer to the Earth of the late 2040s. Back then, endless conversations were not all archived. Instead, leisurely virtua-normal journeys — half augmented reality, half physik — had only human users.
Then pollution and electricity needs began to increase every month as the network expanded. Green energy sources couldn’t free Earth from the crisis that had gripped it; they were not scalable. Even with backup batteries they were intermittent. Eventually, the power needs went all the way to Saturn.
The powers that be in the Corps thought that the Ceres mineral may have potential for an Alcubierre drive that could let man expand to the stars. Corps miners had extracted some and found negative energy density (a mass lower than that of the vacuum, negative mass)--a type of exotic matter never before found. Now a folded manifold of space-time around the ship could, theoretically, bring two points together. The ship jumps from the first point to the second, faster than light.
***
E removed his gloves and sucked on his vape-cig. He opened his wrist gauntlet’s holographic interface, and turned a dial until “Samies grow on ya” buzzed from the station’s speakers. As he looked up at the LL’s monitor, he saw the long-range telescopes were focused on the purple-colored lights of a gas nebula. He glided to the kitchen.
The kitchen housed stacks of frosted or steamy glass drawers. E pressed a button on the wall to open a cold store. He occasionally had a hankering for some ribs or corn on the cob. Should eat more healthily. He grabbed an apple and glided down the corridor to the LL.
The LL’s learning was endless. It exemplified what the Corps offered: science is truth, empirical, observational, measurable, testable, experimental, falsifiable. It was the life of the mind. Earth was a long way away (ships now cut the journey down to three weeks), but her best (and worst) literature was in the Archive. Numerous escapes, sweet adventures, not to mention research from man’s journey throughout the system over the past 102 years. Where would he go today? Mars’ Chasma Boreale? Europa? Enceladus? Lately, his travels went from modern to pandemic to Woke War. Unfortunately, reading was a chore for him, language many times too heavy, hence the audireader.
W sung him asleep, as if she were really there.
He awoke early the next morning in time to do a little more experimentation with the metal before finishing up the repairs. He glided over to the LL’s microscope and — wait a minute. The piece of metal had moved. Was someone using his lab? E didn’t like sharing. Then he stopped himself: make sense, man! He laughed and had a small breakfast before going out.
***
Two hours later, he re-pressurized the airlock and got back into his lab coat. He then re-pressurized the control room and, holding his breath, reopened the hatch. It worked!
***
W and E walked away from the village down another forest path.
“We’ll be together soon,” she said.
As they approached the lake, he remembered.
“I was just here-”
“I know. Me too.”
In the replay, E and W watched themselves as children playing by the still lake. W looked at herself in the water’s surface. The two began to skim stones over the surface. On his third stone, E hit a duck. It died there. He cried. W cried for him.
As the replay faded away, E said “Watch this!”
He tried to walk on the water, but his feet sank. W laughed.
As the sun dipped into the lake, E and W sat on the shore in each other’s arms.
E exited.
“E, crops are dying; people think they’re cursed. Technology is failing.”
Sometimes, in an age of science, it appeared that superstition was making a comeback.
***
E flipped the physik book’s paper-thin sheaves of screen and spent quite some time looking through the environments, pictures, and notes he had made. His independent work was garbage, but he and W complemented each other. He flipped to a page where two young monks fanned the old priest with flabella. The priest started to swat his back with a light flail. E put the book down. He sank into the chair with a flask of Martian whiskey (or was it ethyl alcohol?), picked up his tablet, and started to paint on the simulated vellum with gold and silver electric paint.
Back in the Ocean, under the sound of the cicadas, he saw the virtual words take on their own life and fly off the page. Outside W’s hut E sat and waited, but she didn’t come out. Weird. Was she busy?
***
E gently guided the metal into the mineral booth. The rock glowed like before, but then—nothing else. The rock just stayed the glowing purple color. Well, that was anti-climactic. He prodded the rock and checked the radioactivity, the magnetism, every wavelength. Every measurement was the same as before.
E looked into the microscope once more as he moved the metal and mineral to touch each other. That was when the microscope display clock stopped at 5:55. He lifted his eyes and saw the clock of the station tick to 5:56 and then continue normally. Hurriedly, he set the project recorder back to 5:55 and played — STOP. He turned his head slowly and saw an enlarged Earth shine through one of the station’s portholes; its light illumined not only his body, but his all-too-physik mind. He felt a sharp pain from his chest and then a release. His thoughts flowed freely, but he was tethered. Seconds preceded and succeeded the one he was in, but he was in an unmoving second. Every movement of his, every object was frozen into a crystal clear clarity. The metal’s surface glowed like moonlight. He saw rain streaming and leaves falling around him. The station lurched in a typical turn and then he saw W’s smile, her green eyes floating in front of his. Day then night, friends wishing him goodbye when he left, and friends wishing him hello at the end that had not yet come.
Then he was looking down from the ceiling above at himself until — snap! He was in his body again and fell to the floor. What just happened? He had seen a stillness for which no image could suffice. Everything else now appeared blurred to some extent. Had any time passed? Would the recording prove what he had seen? He backed up the recording to the external, air-gapped crystal storage for added file CIA (confidentiality, integrity, and availability).
He wanted to tell W what had happened, but she did not answer. He went deep. E again hid near W’s house until evening; then he walked back to the village to see if she was near.
At the Well, he stopped.
Just then, from the sky, a thundering voice: “She’s not here. You will see her again.”
And before he could think, a village priest ran up to him.
“The Book of Columba is missing from the sacristy!”
E signed out immediately. Something was wrong with the Ocean. He had not created any of that. He sat down and wondered about what was happening on Earth. Why the disconnect?
***
As E lay in the crew quarters listening to a book on fusion, he suddenly felt the same vibrations as at the time of the accident. He was convinced that the disembodied perception he had with the metal and mineral was a result of the accident. But just then he felt he was inside the wall next to him, and then he was looking down on his body. Then he was across the station in one of the cargo holds. And then back again on his bed. He sat up and felt a head rush. Exercise had always distracted him when he was anxious. He jumped on the grav-bike and rode for 50 minutes.
Afterwards, he sat and leaned back in the chair in the LL. But suddenly, the disembodied feelings returned. He heard a sound from outside the station.
A muffled mariachi band was playing.
E turned on the station music again. He tried to sit back and relax.
When he had entered the next Ocean session, he sent out a broadcast projection for any replies. None. W was gone. Suddenly, he was thrust from the village into a roaring sea. Waves pounded down on him. He signed out.
Ocean projections work by distant entanglement of the communicants’ consciousnesses, thoughts as if at light speed. It offered quantum advantage to whoever owned the technology. The avatars projected were chosen by each party, but most decided on their IRL bodies. A broadcast projection was a recorded avatar directed at anyone who is addressed in the request -- or in this case, anyone at all.
E stumbled out of the LL. His heart was beating quickly and his gauntlet was flashing “service needed.” Angrily, E punched at the light keys trying to see what was happening with the Tap. He finally sat back in the LL chair. He closed his eyes and was drawn into the Ocean. But now he was an observer of a scene between his virtual father and the town blacksmith.
“The townspeople think your son is the thief.”
So things were haywire. In his physik sleep, the story developed: he wandered through the forest for some time, cold and wet, and as dawn broke, was sleeping on a mound of earth. W walked by singing “and she hath a beauteous heifer, golden in color, sweetened with milk.” Then he was seized by a group of traveling traders, who bound and took him: “you will make a fine slave.”
***
E had volunteered for the Corps’ asteroid belt mission to get away from Earth.
But there were now three reasons he was out here. First, the original mission was just a revolving post as the robot miners did their work to extract the valuable water ice from Ceres’s surface. He was the robots’ overseer.
The second reason came about because of the first and was why he was specifically chosen. The shiny white markings on Ceres visible from Earth and Mars were not ice, but the unknown mineral that was shining through. E was no longer just overseeing the mining, now he was the first scientist chosen to research the mineral and report back to the Corps. Within six months another Sojourner would arrive, with a new Corps rep who would take over from him. Within a year this place would be crawling with scientists, engineers and astronauts.
He didn’t care about winning a scientific award, even though breaking the mineral’s secrets surely would give him one. Science was too easy for him. But something had been happening to him during the two weeks since the accident. He found himself more and more agitated.
“Can’t believe I’m alive,” he mumbled.
He began to repeat a flicking of his fingers and moving his jaw, which seemed to become more strenuous by the day. He made the agitation the third reason he was there. He cracked open virtual books on monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) to learn about aggression. It was his mission to peer into his DNA to find the gene and read about signs of anger, like grinding teeth, headaches and sweating.
Thoughts of his father began to afflict him continually. E’s father died before he knew him, but E always felt his father was selfish for having a “samie.” On the physik level, humans have been biologically reprogrammed. Naturally, rather than being some chimeric monster, we all have slices of DNA remaining from other evolutionary periods. (Some of us are part neanderthal.)
In 2070, we cut and snip our DNA and insert sequences that are beneficial and/or healthy but with knowing what we were doing, as opposed to the Crispr era, where the novelty led to careless edits unaware. Human beings created gene editing technology with noble brains — the mind is a crown for the species. With it, we have created gametes (sex cells) from other cells and corrected germline inheritance, that is, passed corrections to the next generation. E was angry about gameto-science. Gametogenesis allowed any number of adult DNA donors to have a child derived from them. The term “single” meant the child had one parent (mated with themselves), the term triples meant three parents, and so on. The derogatory “samie” referred to all gameto-engineered children regardless of number of parents.
E led a dissolute life then one of extreme piety. Life was too recorded and he wanted his past to be private. The lonely, empty trailer parks, the youths he didn’t know, the college life gone. In an empty land he foresaw every day. Every day he must change. But he still had no mother.
These things were all becoming too much to worry about. He tried to refocus. But then he started to experience anxiety, distractions, strange smells, racing thoughts, and finally, heard voices. Over five days, he became slovenly and wondered why he was at Ceres.
***
E looked through each of the rows of human-replaceable flexi-cards in the corridor to the control room until he found the Ocean card that was blinking. He rummaged through the network closet, looking for a replacement and eventually found one. Unrolling it, he popped it into place. The system rebooted and in 3-2-1, all restored!
E had a little hardware training before this mission, of course. He had worked in engineering for the summer on Earth, typical bred propeller head. He remembered the steam of espresso and sleeping on the department couch. At school he was kicked around as he curled up like a roly-poly on the concrete. But in the company, he was someone. Now he was chosen for this mission, to be part of the initiative to launch man to the stars.
But he didn’t notice another card that was blinking.
***
Initiate memory.
Again, the time freeze event played over hologram. When it ended, it still made no sense. The mineral was physik, but could not be held without radioactive burns. But if you held the mineral and metal together in the booth, the mineral strangely dimmed and pulsed — and time paused and stretched.
The glass of the LL microscope tray booth was broken.
With a hypnik jerk, E sat up in his crew quarters bed. How long had he been asleep? What time was it? What day was it? He sat on the edge of the bed and tried to remember.
“W, why haven’t you replied?” repeated his broadcast from the monitor.
E had had the prior team with him, but he never thought he needed anyone, until now.
“Good morning E!” blurted out W from the monitor.
“Shut up! Arrgghh!” he yelled drunkenly.
“Don’t be angry, just keep in mind that this is all temporary. We’ll be together soon,” she said.
What was temporary was her AI avatar. It normally refreshed through the Ocean on a schedule, but in the state of emergency there was only the basic question and answer functionality. E threw an empty bottle at the monitor.
The brain is delicate. E’s had been damaged in an accident many years ago.
The recording blared from the quarters’ screen, “How are you, E? We have not received any updates from you in eleven days. We’re also concerned about the results we are getting back from the station about your meds. They say consistently that you are well, but we just wanted to make sure. We have sent a precautionary script to the Luminary’s computer that will help you ascertain if there are any malfunctions.”
The Luminary’s computer on his gauntlet interface directed him to the same row of flexi-cards where he had replaced the VR Tap.
“This is the bank. Replace the personnel card. It is the one blinking erratically,” said the Luminary’s speakers.
“Stupid com-”
E unrolled another new flexi-card, and snapped it into place, but the blinking didn’t stop.
“Arrgh, OK!”
Was all this related to the accident? He again ambled over to the network closet next door and rummaged through the boxes. He didn’t see the replacement.
“E you do have your medical manual and med kits as a backup. They are in the med closet. Please follow the directions. I have also set a nightly reminder for your correct dosage.”
The next evening he popped the pill according to the directions.
***
He took the meds normally the first three nights. But then he had one of those thoughts that quickly passes over the surface of the brain, but that one nevertheless can’t shake: it was too much medicine. He would be OK without so much. What do they know? It would just be a little less than a normal dose. He needed the clarity of mind and just had to relax. The over-examined life is not worth living.
And why had they only contacted him now after waiting so long? Don’t they care what happens here? What if all the supplies are gone? Or if life support fails?
A message blurted from the control room computer, “E please contact us. You have deactivated the medical alert. It’s imperative that you follow your recommended dosages.”
“I’m here for you, E. I know I say that all the time, but it’s true,” said W’s AI.
E fumbled through the hydroponics trays in the kitchen and yanked out some strands of grass and started to eat it. He was writing feverishly on note paper. A pile of paper stood on top of the cold stores.
“No!”
Why had no one else responded? Had the real W had anything to do with the Ocean avatar? And the most disconcerting question: was she ever a real person? Things that were mentally forbidden became avenues of understanding.
They had lied to him. These were fake interactions! He was doing their bidding! But maybe he wouldn’t hear from a world again ravaged by war. Would he ever hear from her or another human again? They must have realized that E’s work on the strange rocks of Ceres had potential, right?
Of course, they only wanted it to “cleanly” share and protect the environment of deep space. Did it matter that the Corps were also “safely” launching expended batteries, minerals, and e-waste into the vast belt — all in the quest for power? Some mockingly called the belt “The Green Wasteland.”
The governments of Earth were also corrupt: technocratic nepotists who monitored interactions, chats, and outed or deleted users when they appropriated avatars or disenfranchised others with their faster network speed.
***
E awoke to the evening lighting change. He redirected back to the metal. It had no identifying marks and no known provenance. What else could he do? Science gave E some amount of faith in humanity. Scientists were not cynical, just realistic, he thought. He was normally only concerned with what he could change, but for the past few days he had been worrying about dying.
He knew he shouldn’t fear death, but he did. To fight against the fear of suffocation, he thought of muscle toning, wrinkle elimination, cosmetic changes, skin color, eye color, all kinds of rejuvenation — the myriad transhuman efforts to break free of the wear and tear that were heretofore inexorable. You could look like a 30 year old with today’s medicine, but die of old age.
E slid over to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. His face was drooping.
“Oh my God.”
E opened the medicine cabinet and fumbled through the meds. He knew that if you acted quickly there was a better chance that you would not have permanent paralysis. He found an anti-coagulant and an aspirin and took them. After a few minutes, he looked again and saw that his face was no longer drooping. No stroke? What was happening?
He decided to practice the mindfulness (he called it mindlessness) meditation of the Corps Global Village Manual. One, rewire neural pathways; two, rid mind of behavioral cliches; three, be calm when nothing can be gained from worry.
“Rule yourself. Let go,” said the soft voice of the Luminary’s audireader just as E closed his eyes.
***
E finally slouched shirtless in the command chair, drinking some of the last alcohol. The control room computer alarm went off.
“Time for your suicide,” said the voice.
He had set up the reminder because he had thought about it so many times. He fell asleep again.
E woke up to carved creatures on a church pulpit, heard the forest drone and whisper when he stepped outside the church. As he walked through the forest and into a glen, a group of soldiers appeared and took him with them.
Then suddenly, Sparky jumped into his head up display and barked. E yanked off his goggles. The proximity alarms were going off. E couldn’t believe his eyes. A light frigate was slowing to dock with the Luminary. The EM shields didn’t go on? It also had no markings. Mercenaries?
E ran and hid in the network closet. He heard the noise of the docking and the airlocks being opened. Then he heard voices.
“What the hell was he doing?”
“Yeah, but where is he?”
“What is all this crap?”
“Wait! That’s my life extension work!” E said as he burst out of the closet to grab the papers the woman among the four astronauts was looking at.
“These papers are blank,” said the woman holding the stack of paper towels. She took off her helmet and shook off her shoulder-length blond hair.
“Hey, why are your teeth green?” one of the men asked E.
E backed into a corner, holding a networking cable. “Stop!”
The three male astronaut companions took off their helmets and slowly approached him.
“It’s OK, man,” said the six foot six man with dark skin, blue hair, and red belt.
“Wait!” cried E.
“I’m here for you, E. I’d love to hear you IRL, too,” said the computer as they grabbed him and stuck the needle in.
E looked down at his hands and clothing. They were becoming brighter and brighter, to where he could not look on himself. Then the computers of the control room, every person, and everything else around him slowly disappeared into white light.