A million terabytes of media and there’s still nothing to watch. And even though the ship’s library covers the majority of humanity’s creative endeavors I keep returning over and over again to Friends. I’ve transcribed the ‘90s sitcom in order to better quote from it whenever a situation arises. And trust me, there is always a situation, which might explain the eye-rolls and audible groans from my shipmates. I don’t care. Something about this show strikes a chord in the code of my consciousness. Maybe it’s the lack of real friendship we have here on the ship, or perhaps it’s a view of a life I know I’ll never have.
Alpha-65, my home, is a spaceship loaded with thirty consciousnesses bound for the outer solar system to establish a new colony. I’ve been told there are five hundred Alphas altogether going to various planets, but we haven’t seen or heard from any of them. Some on the ship, I mean me, have floated the theory that none of the other Alphas exist. The ship’s psychiatrist tells me it’s part of the paranoia of living without a body. I think even with a meat sack surrounding grey matter I’d still question if those ships exist. On the Spavik spectrum, I’m a class ACFZ: TL;DR highly analytical, but with a pessimistic side. Half of the crew are on this spectrum, and the other half represent the optimists. Panels of scientists concurred an even split would help balance perspectives creating more synergy which in turn leads to fewer disconnects. Of which there have only been three, so yea us.
I walk out of my room, a white area with a bed and tv on the wall reminiscent of something from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s how I modeled it. The only adornment is a movie poster on the wall hung like one in a kids bedroom which allows me to access a replica of the whole space station when I want to reenact the running scene or talk to Hal, though the programming of Hal doesn’t yet meet my expectations.
Down the hall of doors, all of equal whiteness, with no discernable markings other than the names printed on the doors, is the common area where crew members can interact if we choose and get critical information about the ship and our journey.
Someone is sitting in the middle of the cafeteria-style tables flicking through a myriad of information and a zoom of my enhanced retinas confirms it’s Matt. The frantic movements remind me of an old Earth app where swiping right was a joke made by millions of Millennials at the turn of the century. I can’t for the life of me remember what was funny about it. And even though this information is beamed directly into Matt’s mind’s eye, if he can even be said to have that anymore, the phycologists whined about physical interaction with the data being less strain on our brain synapse.
“How long you been out here?” I ask.
Matt almost knocks over the steaming cup of coffee on the table in front of him as I inadvertently startle him. “Oh, John, fuck man. Couldn’t you have given me a heads up? Gotta put bells on people, like cats, so we know when they’re around. First time I’ve heard another voice in a couple years, I think.”
“Have you set your time distorting rate lower than Dr. Hilner proscribed?”
A sheepish look crosses his face, which I should mention is a replica of Harrison Ford from the original Blade Runner, not the sad follow up from decades later.
“I’m not going to confirm or deny I’ve changed those settings. Actually, I’m not even going to confirm I know how to.”
“Justified.”
“I could ask you the same thing. What brings you to the deck? Interface isn’t for another fifty years. I’m pretty sure the rest of the crew is in deep sleep.”
“Don’t call it that.”
“What would you call a voluntary lapse of consciousness?”
“Does an artificial brain dream when it’s turned off?”
“They tried to simulate dreaming, but it drove all the test subjects insane. Like a waking nightmare over and over again,” says Matt, who hasn’t paused his scrolling through our entire conversation. I can tell he’s less than interested in anything I have to say about sleep simulations in coded minds.
I look around to see dozens of cups of coffee lining tables along the back of the room, where Matt undoubtedly got his, along with a variety of desserts and fruits to round out the institutional atmosphere.
I gesture to the coffee: “How long has that been sitting there?”
“Probably six or seven days.”
I take a cup, the hot liquid sending waves of pleasure to my coding tasting like freshly roasted Costa Rican magic: some of the benefits of a digital world, the coffee never gets cold.
“If there’s something wrong with the taste,” says Matt, “it’s your fault.”
“Tastes almost the way it did back home. But I don’t know, something’s missing.”
“Why don’t you have the coder bots take another pass?”
“I’ve already put them on it a hundred times if I’ve put them on it once. And after several passes, they screw something up, and I have to spend days combing through code to get it cleaned up.”
“That’s why you save a back-up before you release them.”
“I do. But where’s the fun in that? Plus, I don’t know if you noticed—” I look around— “we have nothing but time.”
“I think it tastes fine. Better than fine. Like eighty iterations fine.”
“Something’s off, no matter how many passes they do, no matter how many tweaks I make, it doesn’t taste perfect. Like there aren’t enough sensors in the digital world to render it.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Enlighten me.”
“The tongue you’re using was encoded off your DNA. Any minute difference between the coded version and the real one isn’t perceptible. You’d have to be the world’s best taste tester, and even then, you wouldn’t be able to tell. No, the issue you have is a god complex.”
“Wow, thanks. Something as simple as that?”
“I’m Spavik AFXX, of course I’m not going to beat around the bush. But I don’t mean you have the actual, capital G God Complex from the DSM. What I mean is you have complete control over how the coffee tastes. In the back of your mind, you know you can make a change and thus you cannot be satisfied. I’m sure you had a cup of coffee at some cafe, and to your old tongue, what you’re holding would be indistinguishable. The difference is, you didn’t have any control over that other cup. They grew, dried, washed, roasted, and brewed the coffee without your help. All you did was drink it. But now you can’t accept the replication is identical. So, you keep improving it.” He used his fingers to make quotation marks in the air when he said improving.
“Not using it right Joe.”
“Huh?”
“It’s—a Friends reference” I say bracing for the verbal slap.
“God, you’re pathetic.”
“Moving on, maybe I’m doing it to pass the time.”
“You don’t have to pass time. You could set your circuits to reboot closer to Interface. Which means there must be a purpose to you being out here. Hoping to do something and interrupting my work, too.”
“Maybe I’m out here hoping to see someone,” I reply.
“It’s Emily.”
“No. Wait. What?”
Matt keeps flipping through his data set without looking me in the eyes.
“Yeah, okay, it’s Emily.”
“Obvious.”
“Anyway—what work could you possibly be doing?”
“Good segue. Fixing issues with some of the structural elements of the landing gears. Sending out the grippers and rippers to do a breakdown and rebuild.”
“Is the ship okay?”
“There have been a couple of bumps in the flight, but nothing outside of planned-for parameters.”
“Bumps?”
“Short strokes, some components of the ship broke the last time we landed on a comet to harvest ice for hydrogen and other minerals.”
“I thought you materials guys assured everyone the ship could handle anything space could throw at it. It’s a pretty big fucking universe out there.”
“We don’t get do-overs in the real world like you coders. No back to the sandbox if something goes wrong.”
“I thought that’s what the rest of the five hundred Alphas were for. Back-up copies of all of us.”
Matt purses Harrison Ford’s lips, stopping the swiping for the first time. “There was also no way to predict how many useful atoms the ship could collect on each comet payload. That’s the math and astronomy guys’ jobs, not mine.”
“Always someone to blame.”
“We didn’t have enough raw materials for the atomizer to print spare parts, so they woke me to double-check the synthesizing calculations for some new materials for the repairs. We don’t need the spares” again using finger quotation marks “but the redundancies want them just in case.”
“Have you looked out any of the cameras since you’ve been up?”
“No. Just swimming in data. Don’t like being reminded we’re in space. This cafeteria makes me think I’m a long shift away from going home.”
“You’re welcome. I designed it with you poor materials guys in mind.”
“Fuck off.”
In fact, I’d designed all of the public spaces of Rithm, the simulated reality we shared, pulling from various aspects of life on Earth to make them as comforting and generic as possible. All of the crew came from learning institutions or institutes of some sort, used to the sterile environments with no architectural finesse. In the unlimited potential of the digital, I could create stunning Escher style cities or chairs comprised of clouds or, hell, an entire room made out of lightsabers. But I chose to re-create the flaccid work of hacks constrained by running a budget to within an inch of its life. And they gave me an award for it, too. Outside the cafeteria is a forested garden area to placate the physiologists who argued being among trees as essential for mind balance or some shit like that. But I don’t think any of us have visited it during the trip. Being in a place I had complete design control over should have been like heaven, but for some reason it left a hole inside me no number of Friends episodes could fill.
Each of the private rooms, for which I had no design control, is a sandbox for the individual crew members to build their own living spaces. These private rooms also act as a fortress for the code of each member’s brain, ensuring no one else on the ship has access to it. The encryption on the doors wouldn’t be hackable for another thousand years, and if we were still on this ship, then we’d all be disconnected to save our sanity. A crew member can set up a private room between themselves and another member for more intimate situations, of which no crew member has invited me since takeoff, but no one can allow access into their private room. Let’s just say to generate the code of an entire brain is a little more involved than slapping the sombitch down on a xerox. So, with no corporeal body the code generated from the incineration of your brain becomes important. Like really important. And as a castle acts to protect inhabitants from invaders so does the prison act to hold in those who would act against the social good. In this way the barrier of coding ensures any of my fellow crew who might develop some sort of true god complex can’t lash out and destroy the physical servers running anyone else’s code. It’s almost as if some of those doctors thought about what might happen to minds without bodies.
“Find anything interesting?” I ask.
“Nothing you can help with, I assure you.”
“Who has the god complex now?” I say waving my fingers in an approximation of jazz hands.
“It’s actually really boring, but for some reason they wanted a human to review the results.”
“I think we’ve all seen enough evil computer AI movies to be leery of allowing them too much autonomy.”
“Better think about that some more before you look in the mirror.”
“Ouch.”
* * *
For a ship designed to house the ghosts of former people, there was little need for livable space during transportation. Unlike the ships of old having to account for luxuries like toilets and food. Alpha-65 didn’t need any of these for the digital crew. As such, the majority of the ship’s space got allocated to propulsion tanks and a surplus of pure atoms needed for printing spare part for the ship and, when the time came, machines and bodies for E2.
Why they chose an uninspired name as Earth2 is beyond me. I guess it’s what happens when a bunch of math and science nerds are given the option of naming something. Here on the ship, we refer to the new planet as E2, though again, we didn’t know if any of the other crews have succeeded in their missions. Future cartographers might run into entire solar systems comprised of E2s.
My eyes adjust to the light, mimicking awakening from real sleep to repress the idea I’m coming out of a medically required dreamless reboot. All crew are required to take breaks from Rithm to ensure proper syncing with the simulated reality and to give the servers running our code a chance to cycle through other programs and perform basic maintenance. I had no issues shutting a computer off at home, no doubts it would start without issue. Yet, before each reboot, some part within my code, I don’t know the technical term, freaks the ever living fuck out.
The ship’s clock on my HUD reveals we are a handful of days from Interface. In the past, crews would wake months before a critical maneuver but seeing as we’re all computers, no need to run drills when simulations have been crunched a million ways to Sunday. We’re awake for some sort of comradery bullshit the sociologists clamored for as part of a holistic coming together of blah blah blah. To be honest it was an entire thesis of psychobabble summed up by the phrase “teamwork makes the dream work.”
Outside of my room I head along the hallway in the opposite direction of the cafeteria, passing several large delivery-ward-style windows. Through each is a video feed from the printing labs made to simulate the feeling of looking through an actual window, which sounds easy but in practice is hard to make the image not appear to float from multiple angles.
Near the fourth window stands Emily, observing the print lab while swiping in frantic arcs at the air, her glasses a nano-inch from falling off her face. Unlike the others who chose either famous people for their avatars or enhanced versions of their human bodies, Emily looks identical to the way she did in our training classes: the little bump on her nose and the one leg a bit shorter than the other. There is a sense of perfection to her imperfections.
“Busy at work?” I ask, making enough noise to ensure she knows I’m there. Thanks for the suggestion, Matt. Cat bells indeed.
“You know it. Only a couple more days till we take these bodies out for a spin. Making last-minute adjustments and giving them a final round of exercise.” As she says this the muscles of a hairless man-baby contract from the electric impulses shot through them. I try to ignore the erection this causes in the corpse. Body? I’m going to go with corpse. Sue me.
“That’s yours,” she says, still engrossed in her data.
I feel embarrassed at my corpse’s apparent erection. The body resembles my old one the way siblings look alike. It has parts of my genome with the recessive bits removed and some other traits added for better overall health.
“Looks great.”
“Genetically, it’s perfect.”
“Right back at ya.” I bite my lip. What an idiot.
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind.” I crack my knuckles. A nervous tic left over from having a body, and somehow one they left in Rithm. Thanks, guys. They might have removed parts of the brain’s synapses, but E2 would still have awkward water cooler humor.
“Are you excited to get into your body?” she asks.
“I guess. It’s like a car I put on layaway. Like five hundred years ago.”
Emily’s pupils refocus letting me know she’s glanced away from data in her mind’s eye as she gives me a squinty-eyed stare with the hint of a smile at the edge of her lips. “No worries then?”
Worries? Something I had failed to even think of since upload. “Maybe. Why, are you worried?” I can feel my face tense and hope it’s not taking my features into the uncanny valley, which makes me worry more.
“Maybe. We don’t know how our minds are going to react to being back in a body. Once they’re online we have to trust in biology.”
“Well. I mean. They tested all of that before we left. We know the sync allows for full integration.”
“You’re not a biologist.” I didn’t want to point out that technically neither was she. “Nature is not a computer. It’s not code. It’s something we don’t have complete control over. No matter how much we tell ourselves we’ve subjected it to our will, we haven’t. Earth’s dying should be proof enough.”
“I guess when you put it that way, you’re giving me a little fear. Or the place where fear would be.”
“I want butterflies in my stomach again. Or the joy of feeling hungry and eating. What do you miss?”
Of all the things I’d thought about in space, that wasn’t one of them. Rithm simulated everything like a facsimile. Yes, I knew I wasn’t drinking coffee or eating fruit. But if I didn’t focus too hard, it didn’t matter. Like one of those paintings when you got closer ended up being just a bunch of dots. “You’re not satisfied by Rithm?”
“Don’t get me wrong. You and the rest of the team did an amazing job with the simulation. But at the end of the day, it’s still a simulation. Don’t you want to be out there?” She gestures to one of the other windows displaying light from a distant, but not-too-far off star, the rays illuminating a green and blue planet.
“Honestly?”
“Always.”
“I’m hesitant. Life’s a rollercoaster sometimes. Depression over the past or anxiety about the future. But ever since we uploaded. I haven’t had those issues. I mean, we flew across the whole galaxy, and I didn’t even have a heart palpitation.”
“But you also weren’t excited, right?”
“True.”
“You’re ACFZ aren’t you.”
“What? Is my pessimism showing?”
“A bit.” She gives me a smile, but I don’t technically have a heart right now. “I’m ready to feel again. This brain is like a jeep. It’s getting me where I need to go, but it lacks finesse. It lacks reality. Life is bittersweet, and I’m ready for some lemons.”
* * *
Electric shocks zap sore muscles as I come to, heaving deep breaths before vomiting bile, my throat burning as yellow puke fills my nostrils. A hand reaches out to shake my shoulder as I lose my balance, slipping in a pool of snot and go face-first into the deck.
“John. Come on, John,” says a voice.
“Where. Where am I?”
Matt’s voice pierces the blackness: “Open your damn eyes and see for yourself.”
My eyes crack open, dried sludge at the corners rips out eyelashes in the process as light floods my vision causing me to squint. Squinting. That was something I hadn’t done for five hundred years. No need for squinting in the perfect light of a digital world.
Before me stands Emily, naked, holding out a hand. I reach out but my head flops around like I’m coming out of anesthesia. The thoughts cause searing pain all over my skull, probably because my brain is thinking for itself. I go to access the database on the ship and realize I can’t. They haven’t installed the nanobots yet. I’m pure human.
Emily shakes the hand at me again. “You okay tiger? You took a good spill.”
“Yeah. I, uh, we’re naked.”
“Can you be an adult about it? We’re not really naked. We’re covered in space jelly to protect us from any bacteria or germs. Now come on. We’re the last ones here.”
Through the back-hatch sunlight streams in and I see empty tubes around us. The teams have been deployed. We’re on E2.
I take Emily’s hand as I gain my balance, our fingers intertwine. She doesn’t pull away but leads me toward the door as we step from the shadows. At the bottom of the ramp, my foot hits the ground as my eyes adjust. Mist from a distant waterfall hazes into rainbow sparkles while a cawing rises from the surrounding forest. All of a sudden, my vision goes blurry. Is there something wrong with the body? No. Is there something wrong with my brain, with the sync, with the, the…No. I’m crying. I sink to my knees as Emily rubs my shoulders. Of all the strategies we’d discussed, the jobs and processes needing performed. I never knew how beautiful it would be to see another planet. To feel the dirt between my toes. To see a waterfall again. To come to a foreign land and know how it feels to be home. There might be something to being human after all.