Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [306]
They’d left behind, outside the macros, tens of thousands of human minds running at more-or-less human speed: slow folk, they were called. Most of them were from the labour-company camps. Whether they were in their original bodies or in robots, their job was to harness and harvest the dumb-mass requirements of the smart-matter civilisations. Within the macros, the others – the fast folk – had copied, split and merged, reproducing with post-biological speed into billions. The account spoke of the process as if it had happened in the far past, although the dates showed that it had come to fruition only three years earlier.
But those minds were thinking, and living, thousands of times faster than human brains. To them our world was already as ancient as Sumeria, and theirs the millennial work of men like gods.
The next screen that came up offered an option labelled: Sign-off. It repeated what Reid had explained, the offer of a temporary, and indefinite, return to oblivion. All I had to do was key in my name.
I considered it. Then I noticed that the icon had a file attachment labelled History. Just what I wanted to know, I thought, and pointed at it.
It wasn’t the history of the project, or of the world. It was the history of the Sign-off file: my own name, dates and times. The times between ‘Status open’ and ‘Status closed’ increased from hours in the first to weeks in the last-but-one entry.
There were seven of them. The eighth had flipped to ‘Status open’ a few hours earlier.
Well, fuck you, I told my weaker, earlier selves. I was going to stick it out, if for no other reason than that suicide was no escape. If escape were possible at all, it would come not from my own death but from the deaths of others: whoever, or whatever, it was that had put me in this place.
I had always wanted to live forever…but not on those terms. I had always wanted the end of history to be: and they all lived happily ever after, and not: and they all died, and went to heaven. I had always thought the time to think about transcending humanity would be when we’d achieved it.
Something in me had changed. If the file was true, I had chosen death seven times over, rather than this existence. But Reid had hinted that the inevitable spontaneous re-awakening might find its subject better fitted to cope. The increased lengths of the times I’d ‘survived’ suggested a selection process, an adaptation: each time I came back, I had a little more iron in my silicon soul.
I had always thought of myself as tough-minded. Now, when I looked back at my real life, I was astonished at how much tougher, more cynical, more ruthless, I could have been. My values hadn’t changed – unless my memory had been warped – but the strength of my passion for them had hardened.
I looked out at the alien things that had abandoned the rest of humanity, that had used me as a machine and now wanted to exploit me as a hired hand, bought off with beautiful visions. I knew that I wanted to live long enough to see their bizarre beauty perish. As I knew it would: I could foresee their fate even then.
I was interested, and I would be there.
I went back to the lounge, lit another cigarette and pressed the first button again. The television didn’t react.
‘Well, hi,’ said a voice beside me. I turned and saw a woman sitting at the other end of the sofa. She had an elfin, mixed-race face. The black flood of her hair and the black smoke of her shift both came to her hips. She slid a hand between her thighs and looked at me. Her eyes were as black as her hair and as big as the night sky.
‘Do you want me to be with you tonight? I know you do. But first, we