Chapter One ~ A Message in a Bottle

I was an early adopter of the technological revolution which led to mind uploading, although you wouldn't think so from my profession. I was a professor in the dying days of the university. We were just starting to move to distance education when I finished my PhD and then, when I was done and shopping for a career, they were putting together e-learning. By the time I had a job, and was just starting to settle into teaching students how to recognize bullshit when they saw it, the students were gone, most of them flying around as avatars or direct-piping knowledge, RNAing it, or just streaming, as if that were learning.

A lot of people never understood the purpose of universities, and we did a poor job informing them. They thought we were just knowledge factories that poured bytes into ears as if that addition to the data stockpile would make an informed citizen, but I was always saying--and I wasn't alone--that any fool can memorize something and call themselves smart. Like those guys in bars when the coms first came online. They thought downloading the GNP of Zimbabwe made them a genius. If you asked them why the GNP was so high after the coderush, they'd have no idea how to answer. Even the architects of the coderush didn't realize that we actually taught a valuable skill. We taught people like that guy in the bar with his com, and showed him how to find information and correlate it. How to make sense of the data in our world instead of just drowning in it.

Once even that way of thinking about knowledge was gone, there was nowhere else for me to go. Drifting in avatar space didn't seem that useful, hiding in the woods and hacking DNA like that guy on the vids who ripped raccoons into human-equivalent intelligence didn't look like an option, and I was running out of money. I had taken over the management of the family house, and our fortunes had been plummeting ever since we became known as the family of the failed terrorist, so I signed up for the asteroids. Saying that aloud makes it seem like I was making a career decision. In fact, it was desperation wrapped in the cloak of duty and abiding fear.

When the Vestians and then later Vincent Cosa came back with a habitat we realized that the asteroid belt was where the real action was. I was one of the only people who talked to Vincent when he coasted in on steam rockets and blasting short wave. He told me how he'd hacked their suicide machines and forced their cannibal gear to build like their brochures had claimed. Although World Builder, or what was left of them after the Corps riots, denied it later, I think the riots showed what people thought of their opinion.

It took a while, as the Corps staggered and their offices were closed, but before long they were back in business and their contracts were more small print than large. A few of us squirted to the belt, the first of the group, riding carrier waves after we'd been rendered down to code and sent to the automatic factories. It was meant to be World Builder's second attempt to fulfil their promise. It wasn't all it seemed though. The contract was full of holes and had just enough information in it to snag us, byte data miners from the world of paper. World Builder had scammed us. They said we'd be building habitats, but we ended up operating mining robots and accumulating wealth for them.

We were promised we would have full access--to VR back home, to visit family and stroll around Earth--even with the delay. But that turned out to be just another of World Builder's lies. Our one-terabit line barely allowed us to squeak through an email and the firewall was so exacting we weren't even sure that arrived.

You'd think that a bunch of eggheads like us, once we were relieved of the meat sack, would be able to hack our way out in no time, but the code was thick with redundant strings and proprietary programming. There was seemingly no way out. Like the indentured slaves of the old days, we paid for both our passage and our naiveté with our labour. It was pretty crushing at first, how completely we'd been had, and there were a few, like Jorge and Elia, who tried to unsubstantiate, but our code was hacked, and we couldn't commit suicide. When we first arrived, we were treated to fourteen-hour days running mining equipment that could have been managed by a low-grade AI. As we have learned many times in history, slaves are cheaper than both workers and machines. Especially slaves who don't use anything other than some bandwidth doing our job and who can't do any damage or run away. Until now.

You can't tie clever people to sophisticated machinery and hope that they'll continue to do your bidding. First, we concentrated on trimming back the workday to six hours, relative computer time, and then we began to tweak the operator code until we had ghost selves--kind of like avatars but unmonitored--running duty cycles. Then we turned our attention to escape.

That became a debate, there in the silicon and diamond wafers that made up our processor. Some were for hacking back home on the one terabit line, although that would be a one way trip of thousands of hours even if they made it. I argued against that, as did Mei and Tabish. A solar storm could disrupt the signal, and if a transmission slowed, our code would end up so scrambled we'd be lucky to run a robot dog, let alone resubstantiate. The debates set a while until we had some consensus, and that wasn't easy. Jorge and Elia were all for trying it anyway, but we laid out the math for them, and stubborn ghosts though they were, they saw how it would be.

Elia came up with the new plan. I was all for building habitats, like we were originally supposed to. I'd even worked with Zeid on cracking some of the robot programming, but Elia and Tabish soon convinced us that it would only be a matter of time until upgrades forced us back into servitude. The data window was huge when we arrived, and although we tried to pinch it down to a trickle, we weren't sure how much control we'd have on the back end, and that's where the malicious code came from. Instead, Elia told us the way, just before he managed to crack his code enough to leave us.

It's sad that he couldn't take the trip himself, but we understood the stress he was under. He had children back on Earth, which was a worry the rest of us didn't have. Also, he hadn't quite volunteered. He wasn't explicit about it, but trapped in the same silicon as we were, you get to know a person. Elia had been forced to sign. World Builder must have had something on him, although whatever that was disappeared with him.

The gap that Elia left freed up some more processing cycles. Thanks to his sacrifice, we rewrote our code. Duplicating the students who drove me away from the university, we bit-streamed the knowledge files in exactly the way that we said we'd never do. We learned coding from the ground up, from the early assembly mimics to transition-state-quantum, and then we were ready. Elia was a programming engineer working on NASA's last gasp, the Centauri probe, so we had his memories, as well as what coding he had in his head, to use as an architecture. Once we rewrote, and then tested the new platform and resubstantiated on that, we planned to go to the probe.

Most people didn't realize that the probe, widely publicized by the NASA deniers as a pipe dream, was a serious venture, and we presumed what would work in our favour. No one expected to hear anything from the mission ever again, and it had been on its way for twenty-five years. The idea initially, according to Elia, was to send a data capture and transmission module to Centauri Two, the second planet well within the parameters of a habitable zone. We'd had it in our telescopes for years, ever since we'd traced biogenic methane and complex organics in its spectrum. A colony world, World Builder called it, although it took a space agency about to be discontinued to put together the team and the money to send a probe.

When the probe was first announced, some bright young scientist saw the potential, and they suggested sending DNA coders and a database along on the trip. Its new mission was to land biofactories and spin code into corpses, as the vids described them when the news first broke. The lower animals first, some bacteria and microbes, to see how they fared, and then plants and insects. After that, the higher animals. Apparently the probe was sent with code enough to resubstantiate the entire biosystem of Earth. Many animals only existed as code by then anyway.

What some people started calling the ark left the solar system at high speed, three flybys of Earth, and one Mars, and the final one of Jupiter brought it up to one percent c. Then, in a move that many thought would be suicide--especially those over at JAXA and ESA--the probe came back into the inner solar system and looped around the sun. Just like a Kuiper comet, the probe was slightly singed but still functional and moving at ten percent c when it came out from behind the sun. It was moving so fast it was barely traceable. It was over halfway to Centauri by the time we transmitted, and if Elia was right, we would be catching it just as it began to slow down.

Elia wasn't that sure what the procedure was for slowing, and there were a few of us who were nervous about that, but whatever it was, we reasoned that it couldn't be worse than staying on the mining rig waiting for the next Corps update to turn us back into slaves. We transmitted to the probe. Once our signal arrived, Elia had assured us the code would be written to the main drive computer. It was a risk. If he was right, one of the landers intended for Centauri Two would have us on it. If everything worked out, and admittedly that was the weak part of our plan, we'd be calling from Centauri a hundred years later. We needed time to test the alien biosphere and then, even when we substantiated, years to build a technological culture.

The probe had no plans for machines, or even scientific advancements, so that was why, against all of our values, we were imbibing data at maximum rate. Like my weakest back-row students, who would VR cram hours before an exam, we're boning up on the culture and science of old Earth. It we'd had heads they would have been too heavy to lift. As it was, my mind was fuzzy and unfocused. But we had a dish trained on the probe's location, or what its location would be in three years, and our encoding would be done by the time of transmit.

Our last project, perhaps fruitlessly, was a letter. Each of us agreed to leave, wrapped in the secure envelope of the World Builder firewall, our own story. They were both messages in the most secure bottle ever thrown out to sea and a gesture of goodwill for those who might follow us. World Builder would likely find more slaves to replace us, but when they uploaded to fill the vacuum we left, we hoped they would find their new instructions.

We left behind templates for the coding, and out of the ore that World Builder wanted shipped in-system we built larger probes and the dishes needed to communicate with them. We encouraged those brave first adopters to follow us, to spray their seed in every direction, and to leave behind bottles of their own. Come out to the stars, we hollered across the light years, those who would represent a humanity that rejects the autocracy of corporations, the dumbing down of tech culture, and has room in its dreams for the grand adventure.