The Mastodon Chronicles

Category: Day Billion Art Trail

  • Mars Hill

    Mars Hill

    ‘He’s not dead, he’s waking up.’

    ‘Move him out of the sun!’

    ‘Is it worth the bother? Can’t we just port him out of that body and put him in storage until we go back?’

    I sat up. The world was slightly green-tinged and misty and my head buzzed with a strange dissonant musical chord. I felt sick.

    A cold hand on my arm. ‘He’s hot as hell!’

    Naomi was crouching in front of me, sweat beading on her forehead. ‘Can you stand up?’

    The words – all the words – seemed to echo against a flat background, as if I was in a small soft-walled room. But I was sitting on a steep red path, with what looked like a stone model of a red planet at the top of it.

    Mars Hill, I thought. I was trying to take a good picture of it.

    Then I was walking, still feeling sick and my legs feeling numb, supported by Naomi on one side and Carys on the other. I was walking on pine needles. In the shade. I began to feel cold, began to shiver.

    I slept.

    When I woke up I was looking at blue ivy. Ava was holding a flask of water in front of my lips. I drank some.

    ‘Slowly.’ Naomi’s voice. I drank slowly.

    I heard Darina’s voice. ‘Look, this body is actually faulty. It’s a risk to our partmind. I think we need to get him inactive and in storage.’

    ‘His experiences will certainly be interesting.’ Rick sounded sarcastic, hostile.

    ‘I think he’ll be OK,’ said Ava.

    ‘It’s called heatstroke,’ said Naomi. ‘It could and did kill people.’

    ‘I don’t feel like I’m dying.’ My voice sounded odd, even to me, as if I’d acquired Simon the Reptile’s voicebox.

    ‘What about the underground city – New Copernicus?’ Carys asked. ‘That guy at the campsite this morning was saying there are some good galleries there, I wouldn’t mind seeing them. And Paolo could rest up.’

    Blue Ivy (a genetic artwork)

    A copper and glass machine came from somewhere, moved all but silently with cool air inside it, sprayed me with gentle mist as we travelled. The sun was replaced by darkness, then by the softly lit towers of a city under a grey dome that looked more like cloud than rock. I must have slept again; when I woke, I was tucked up in a dry comfortable bed with Ava sitting cross-legged on a purple cushion on the floor, watching me.

    After I’d had a drink and some fruit, she let me have my phone to write up my adventure.

    ‘Why does it write to this thing called “The Mastodon Chronicles”?’ I asked.

    ‘It was a joke. Mastodons are an extinct Earth species. Great big mammals. They were around for a couple of million years. Just like us, like our Company.’ She frowned. ‘Some of us, anyway.’ There was a silence, then she said, ‘You don’t remember anything, do you?’

    I shook my head. ‘Nothing. Just bits of Knowing, like someone’s written it on the phone. I don’t know how we really lived out there, what we were, what we did.’ Another silence. ‘I’m about a week old, then.’

    There was something hollow, but wonderful, about actually saying that.

    Very carefully, I asked, ‘They won’t – make me inactive, will they?’

    ‘No. They won’t.’ She was looking right at me now, and there was a vast solidity in her voice, a certainty and power, and I heard in it echoes of the growls and claws of a hundred thousand generations of female mastodons (whatever they were), and humans and the animals that came before humans, standing as high as they could, protecting their children, keeping the future alive.

  • The Miners’ Tail

    Ok so today the limitations of the paper-and-ink level tech we’d decided to use began to show themselves. We missed the trail going out of the campsite, and very soon were wandering amongst the trees with no clear idea where we were.

    The paper map we had showed the West Copernicus Forest as quite a big area – about 40 x 30 km – and the campsite right in the middle of it. Rick tried to use the map to track the path we’d made and, steering by the sun, navigate to where the Art Trail resumed, but after a couple of hours walking we ended up instead in a steep rocky valley that seemed to be climbing into mountains.

    He and Carys peered at the map, muttering things like ‘We’ve got to be about here’ and ‘The sun’s over my left shoulder, so…’

    Naomi and Darina paced around looking impatient.

    ‘I could just use my Link and ask the way,’ said Naomi after a while.

    ‘That would be cheating,’ said Ava. She was sitting on a rock by the side of the path, grinning. ‘We chose to do it this way; this sort of thing was bound to happen.’ She winked at me.

    ‘But we could miss out on some interesting stuff!’ Carys protested.

    I was feeling hot and thirsty, and the bottle in my backpack was empty. ‘Is there any water round here?’ I asked.

    Ava got up and started down the slope. ‘Let’s go and have a look. Water is usually downhill.’

    I got up to follow, but Darina said, ‘Don’t get separated. That could be dodgy.’

    So we all went, and Ava was right, a glint of water appeared between the trees within a few minutes. We scrambled down a rather overgrown slope and found ourselves looking at a small open pond.

    The water was clear, but… ‘How do we know it’s safe to drink it?’ I asked.

    Naomi frowned at me. ‘All open water on the Moon is good to drink, unless it’s salty.’ She scooped up a handful and slurped it. ‘This is OK.’

    ‘You’ll be fine,’ said a booming voice from the shadows.

    I think we all jumped. my heart missed several beats and I felt pins and needles in my hands.

    There was a crunching sound, and a large colourful reptile emerged from the shadows. ‘This is my pond,’ it said. ‘I keep it clean.’

    Simon the Filter Reptile

    He explained that he drank the water from this pond and several others, then returned it as filtered water. ‘In what you would normally call pee,’ he said, flicking his tongue out. ‘Anything dodgy I drop up in the Forest, or bury it. I’m basically a walking water filter. Name’s Simon by the way.’

    Darina introduced us and explained our situation.

    Simon made a knocking sound in his throat which may have been a chuckle. ‘Yes, there were a lot like you back around the Celebrations,’ he said. ‘It isn’t as easy as you think, navigation without Knowing. But don’t worry, you can go to the Mining Museum and join the Art Trail from there. It’s not far.’ He gestured with his tail, pointing to a rocky slope leading up from the pond. ‘Just go to the top of that, you’ll see a flight of steps down the other side. Bit steep, about a kilometre, but you can’t get lost if you stay on the steps and it comes out at the Museum.’

    Darina thanked the reptile and she, Carys and Rick started around the pond, but Ava asked, ‘Do you like being a walking water filter, Simon?’

    ‘Ah, well.’ He flicked his tongue again. ‘It’s one of the few ways you can get a whole body licence on the Moon as just one person. You know about 240 trillion people came to the celebrations? We’re still getting rid of some of them now!’ Again the knocking sound. ‘But it was crowded before that. As soon as they put the sky on, really. Now I used to be a miner – well, mining engineer. First on Earth, then I got bored when I retired and went for the Moon. First remote, then up close. It was fantastic, I got all the memories stored up and I play them now and again. It was… different, back then. Still, I don’t mind this. I’ve got a tail!’ He thumped it on the ground. ‘I wanted one of those when I was a kid, something I saw on the telly I think.’

    ‘And you don’t use the Link or anything?’ Naomi seemed interested now.

    ‘Not really. Just for water reports. I keep the voicebox so I can have a chat, but I don’t do all that advanced mind sharing stuff. Never did. I just like being on my own. In the mines it was, then in the mountains, now it’s in the woods.’

    ‘You don’t get lonely?’ Ava asked.

    ‘You’re only lonely if you want to be. I like passing the same places every day, seeing the same things, seeing them grow and change, just a little bit at a time. It’s restful.’

    Mark 14 Light Rock Service Train

    The Mining Muesum was full of trains. Big, heavy trains covered in protective radiation shells to stop them from failing in the short time they spent on the surface, delivering their load to the launchers. There were some of the launchers too, and great big rock-shattering machines.

    It all sounds a bit primitive, but our ancestors basically removed the whole surface of the Moon that way, down to a depth of several kilometres in places, for use building the Diaspora, the great cloud of human-habitable worlds created around the Sun.

    So lot of the surface that we were walking on had been literally rebuilt, later, when people came to regret what they had done and had the means to fix it.

    ‘History’s full of that kind of thing,’ said Ava. ‘Landscapes ruined and poisoned, then recreated. But they’re always recreated in a slightly different way.’

    Rick snorted. ‘You mean, not a hard vacuum with a three hundred degree temperature range and hard radiation? I don’t think anyone wanted that back.’

    Ava shook her head. ‘I didn’t say it was always a bad thing. Just different. What they’ve built here is – beautiful. It’s the Moon the ancients dreamed of, before they could even go there. But it’s as artificial as the Diaspora or anything we’ve got back home.’

    ‘Everything is “artificial”,’ said Carys. ‘Intelligence, creativity, craft – they change everything they touch, and it can’t be just changed back, anymore than you can put a supernova back together and make a star. Look at this “train” here – that’s a work of art, but so are the others, the originals. Only difference is, they were designed by people like Simon back at the pond, and this was designed by someone trying to say something now about what they did then and…’ He looked again at the object in front of us, shook his head. ‘Not making a very good job of it.’

    Out of the Darkness

  • The Middle-Aged Couple

    Geraldo and Cassie, with their dog Pewter

    ‘Ah! So nice to hear people talking aloud!’

    We all looked up. A man and a woman were walking briskly towards our courtyard breakfast table, with a small honey-coloured animal form which after a moment my limited Knowing file recognised as being a dog.

    We hadn’t seen any other people in human bodies until we came to the Totem Trail stopover. We were, after all, 55 years late for Day Billion. And as you’ve seen the facilities in some places were a bit rudimentary!

    But at this stopover there were several other people in human form, staying in the stone huts that surrounded the restaurant. Most had trouble with spoken language, and Naomi (who’d kept a form of Link active to support her medical role) would politely explain what we were doing. Nods and smiles followed.

    Geraldo and Cassie were different. They spoke the 1st century English we’d chosen as our default language just perfectly.

    ‘Yes, there were quite a few doing your sort of thing back at the time of the celebrations,’ Gerald explained. ‘We had some interesting chats. But then we’ve always stuck to words. No reason to change something that works, is there? Like our bodies.’ He smoothed down the sides of his loose-fitting black jacket. ‘There are a whole load of us living up on the North Escarpment. We call it Skytown because most of us moved up from Earth when they built the sky. You know, the first one, just over this crater. You must pop over and visit.’

    I noticed he was looking at Ava when he said that.

    She made a curious little facial expression around her nose and eyes that I hadn’t seen before. It brought a flush of blood to her cheeks. ‘We might do that! But first we have to finish the Art Trail or Rick here will be very cross with us.’ Her voice sounded different, too.

    ‘Oh, you’re doing the Art Trail!’ Geraldo laughed. ‘Well, good luck with that. But most of it’s still there, I think. You’ll be going on to the Gates of Eternity I suppose?’

    ‘Yes, that’s the plan,’ said Rick. ‘We’ll need to get going soon.’ He sounded like he had that first morning when he’d decided that I was a liability: irritated.

    Darina jogged Rick’s arm. ‘Perhaps Geraldo and Cassie could come with us? It’s only a half hour walk.’

    ‘That would be cool!’ Ava’s face was still flushed, and she was pouting her lips.

    I felt a bit strange, my throat dry, my heart going too fast, like some regulating system in my body wasn’t working properly. I looked at Cassie and Pewter the dog. Neither had said a word, and I wondered if they were just adjuncts for Geraldo, not conscious beings at all.

    Cassie must have read the expression on my face. She grinned at me and said, ‘We’d love to come along. Pewter could do with a walk, couldn’t you Pewter?’

    The dog didn’t reply, and I must have frowned again because she explained that he wasn’t enhanced in any way. ‘He’s just the same little puppy we bought in 2041, really. Life’s just one long walkies for him!’

    The Gates of Eternity

    ‘This is the first one I’ve been really looking forward to,’ said Carys. ‘It looks all over the top and science fictional, but there’s more to it than that.’

    ‘I always think it’s really clever how they keep those stones floating in the sky,’ said Cassie. She was wearing a long red coat over her t-shirt and jeans, because she thought it would be cold inside the Gates. She was right: the warm morning air vanished, replaced by a chill, almost frosty, damp. The sun seemed to carry no warmth.

    ‘Dimensional symmetry disruption,’ said Geraldo.

    ‘Yes, I know the words,’ said Cassie. ‘But it still seems like – miraculous, to me. Against common sense.’

    Carys had borrowed my phone and was looking at the guide. ‘“The gates themselves are based on Sumerian and Babylonian architectural forms from the late Terrestrial Era, but curved to form a space that has a vaginal form, a birth canal leading to the place of miracles beyond.” That’s what the artist says, Cassie, so you were right about the miracles.’

    The little dog was running around the space, jumping and splashing in the shallow water. It ran up to me, and I automatically reached down and petted its head. A sort of shock ran through me. There was something familiar…

    ‘Do you want to come on with us for a bit?’ Carys asked. ‘The woods look warmer than this.’

    ‘I don’t think so, thanks,’ said Geraldo. ‘It always find it’s too warm for us there. And we need to get back for lunch.’

    So we said our goodbyes and walked on. Geraldo was right: as soon as we left the Gates the air became much warmer, almost hot, and the sun shifted in the sky. The floating stones seemed to move too. My sketchy Knowing informed me that such distortions were to be expected when you messed around with the 11 substrata dimensions of the Universe, thus effectively altering the laws of physics. So it didn’t seem miraculous to me, like it did to Cassie, but that seemed a bit of a shame, really.

    There were artworks in the woods: gossamer sheets of colour between the trees, marble pins in the ground, a ‘stream’ made of solid chromium metal. Cerys looked, explained, extemporised. Ava borrowed my phone to make notes. Rick and Darina looked bored and held hands.

    Naomi said, ‘I don’t know why they do that. Geraldo and Cassie, and the dog. They could be anything they want to be – and they’ve just stayed the same for nearly a billion days. They won’t even be able to remember a tiny fraction of it all, even with plugins.’

    ‘They’re happy,’ said Ava without looking up from her notes. ‘That’s all that matters to them. And to Pewter, probably.’

    I wondered if they were. I thought Geraldo was, but I wasn’t sure about Cassie. And no-one could ask Pewter.

    Pewter. The dog. I had petted the dog and his fur was short and coarse and warm and his tail was thumping the ground…

    ‘Ava,’ I asked.

    She looked up. Her face was bright in the cool green light, as if she were a fairy queen, a natural inhabitant of the forest.

    ‘Did your family have a dog?’

  • Totems and The Face

    This is the ‘weird hut’ that we stayed in. I was too tired to really understand it last night, but Ava explained it again to me today over breakfast.

    First I’d better say what I thought was weird. The glowing blue patches on the wall move, slowly changing shape from fish, animals, human faces, machines… And the bright star-like spots also move, sometimes quickly. They even fly away from the wall – they started buzzing round our heads when we first arrived.

    The orange lights that look like pressure chambers are – well, they’re pressure chambers. Inside are very primitive symmetry disruptors, a kind that were developed in the second century EE and are still called ‘servers’ after the even more primitive machines that they replaced. And in the servers are – well, the essences of people.

    I think that was the bit where I sort of phased out yesterday. This morning after a couple of coffees I asked Ava about it again.

    She said it was something that she actually remembered, in her own mind. It wasn’t just history to her.

    ‘When I was a new human, in my first half-century, there was something called Social Media. It let everyone talk to everyone else, leave messages, pictures, things like that.’

    ‘Couldn’t they just talk out loud like we’re doing?’ I asked.

    She laughed, and Carys winked at me. ‘It was better than talking out loud – you could reach anyone anywhere in the world with images, music, moodboards.’

    I noticed that it seemed like he could remember it too.

    Ava made a face. ‘To be honest by the time I was born the tech was old, the people using it were old, too. When you can share a single thought with any number of people at once, without using words, images and moodboards were just out of date. I used to think Social Media was dying out, a silly old thing for silly old people.’

    I opened my mouth to ask what ‘old people’ were in this context, but Ava carried on.

    ‘But the old people were afraid of dying. There was still a lot of death around then, despite a huge effort to prevent it. So some of them latched on to the new symmetry technology, and merged themselves together so they would fit in the servers.’ She waved at the bright orange lights behind the pressure doors. ‘So they were really the first people to disincorporate and move into Companies. There are places like this all over solar space.’

    I noticed that the little lights had moved to the table in front of us, and were swirling around on the tablecloth, as if they were listening.

    ‘So each of these lights is a person?’ Carys was staring at them intently, as if contemplating a work of art.

    ‘Not really,’ said Ava. ‘They had to lose a lot of themselves to upload. When you talked to someone in The Face, it was like talking to a…’ She shook her head. ‘I remember my mum…’ Tears were trickling down her face.

    Carys put a hand on her arm. ‘It’s OK, Ava. You don’t need to explain. I remember… some of it.’

    Naomi, who’d been half-listening and half wolfing down a large pile of fruit and nuts for breakfast, looked up and frowned. ‘How come you two remember that? I don’t.’

    Ava shrugged. ‘I walled off some of my memories when I joined the Company. I suppose … they’re coming back to haunt me now. Haunt us.’

    Like my nightmare, I thought. But I hadn’t existed as a single, separate human at any time, until now. And I wasn’t supposed to have any memories I didn’t absolutely need. So…

    Rick and Darina came into the breakfast space. They were grinning and holding hands, their faces a bit red as if they’d already been for a run.

    ‘Come on you lot! Totem Trail in five!’

    Totem 12 by We Are Termite

    It was this first one in particular. Carys noticed it straight away. ‘There are formal similarities to The Face servers in the hut,’ he said. ‘The globe, the stars on the front material. But of course they don’t have any function here. This is just artifice.’

    I was reading the notification that had come up on my phone. ‘It says there are around 10,000 individuals living in each totem.’

    ‘Sounds about right,’ Rick commented. ‘These are full symmetry disruption units. The matter inside will be restructured to Symmetry 13, so it’s conscious at a molecular level.’

    The words vaguely made sense to me, and I had enough rudimentary Knowing installed to equate this to how we had been living as a Company a few days ago. But I felt that…

    ‘Ten thousand is still a lot for this much space,’ said Carys, putting into language exactly what I was thinking. ‘They can’t be very complicated people.’

    ‘A lot more complex than the ones in The Face,’ said Naomi. ‘Probably about the same as us. And at least they can get outside and change … function… Oh… sorry, Ava.’

    ‘It’s OK.’ But she was sobbing. ‘It’s your past too. It’s just that you can’t remember it. At the moment.’

    I was very conscious of the smell of the pines, the slight hiss of wind in the branches. I realised it was my turn to give some support.

    ‘It’s different for us,’ I said. ‘We’ve made a choice to be like this. And it’s only for a bit of time, one Moon day. And we can stop any time we like. If they stopped… well, they were dead.’ I remembered the fear I’d felt at the thought of a restart. Now I understood it. It was the fear of death.

    And a funny thought came into my head. Maybe I didn’t want to go back to being a Company, to being one person with these five other people. Maybe I liked being this different person, even though I was starting from a blank slate, starting on my own.

    Maybe I liked being me.

    It was good (for me at least) that the Totem Trail was short – only 8km. We were done by lunchtime and I was able to eat a big lunch of bread and cheese and tomatoes, which made me feel very tired so I had to sleep.

    It’s raining now. I suppose it has to do that sometimes. I can hear Rick and Darina laughing with Carys in the next room.

    I had the nightmare again. I think it must be one of Ava’s stray memories. I’m going to ask her about it tomorrow.

  • Yellow Brick Road

    I had the nightmare again. Just the same one. Just the same fear. But I didn’t worry so much about it this time, because I knew what it was. No-one heard me cry out, because this time we were sleeping in separate rooms, and I decided not to tell anyone.

    After breakfast we started on the Yellow Brick Road. Like the Clematis Walk, it’s not really part of the Art Trail, but it was built for the Day Billion celebration. It’s quite long, winding up and down through the small lakes on the Western Escarpment. It’s usually misty in the early morning. Carys described it as atmospheric, but I just thought it was cold. It also wasn’t very yellow in most places – the photo above is about as good as it gets. Apparently the makers decided to let the colour wear away with time.

    We did a 24km section, from the Clematis Walk, back to rejoin the Art Trail where it descends from the escarpment and the big statue. How do you get a map on this thing?

    Sorry it doesn’t want to tell me. I’m really tired now so I’m going to sleep. I’ll tell you about the strange hut in the morning.

    I expect I’ll have the nightmare again.

  • Nightmares and Clematis

    Nightmares and Clematis

    I did sleep but something strange happened. I was in a small room, and there was a huge noise, as if something large and mechanical was banging on the wall. And then this non-human body was sitting on my body, and it had coarse fur and its tail was hitting me repeatedly. It didn’t hurt but it was still scary. I cried out…

    And woke up. I was in my cubicle in the quiet little dormitory room we had chosen for sleep, with low Day 1 sunlight visible through a half drawn curtain.

    Naomi was sitting cross-legged outside the cubicle . ‘Are you OK?’ she asked. ‘You were crying out.’

    I wasn’t sure if I was OK and said so. Strange disconnected thoughts were running through my head, and peculiar colours.

    Naomi closed her eyes and her face twitched a little, and I felt a slight tickling sensation in my brain. I realised that she was breaking our low-tech rules, checking on my mental state properly.

    ‘OK so you had a dream,’ she said. ‘They used to call them nightmares when they were like that. You should recover quickly.’ She gave me some water to drink, and after a while I went back to sleep.

    Our dormitory room for the first sleep, made from an old sea cave.

    I woke up early & wrote what you read above, or most of it. Then fell asleep again. When I got up, the others were gone. I grabbed a picture of the room then went down to the restaurant.

    From the passageway I heard Naomi’s voice. ‘He clearly passes the sentience test so we can’t just…’ She stopped as I came into the room.

    Darina looked up at me and grinned. ‘How are you feeling?’

    My stomach and chest felt curiously cold. I think I was frightened.

    When I didn’t say anything, Darina nodded, said, ‘We were just wondering if you want to have a restart. You know, take the backup copy of the embodiment station record and install you in a new body. You’re not very comfortable in that one, are you?’

    The cold feeling in my torso increased. My throat was dry. It was true, this body wasn’t functioning very well. It was a sensible suggestion, but…

    ‘It means we’d have to wait until the next Lunar day for the walk,’ said Rick. ‘But I guess that’s not an issue after 55 years.’ He didn’t look very happy about it, though. His fist was clenched on the black enamel of the breakfast table. He was wearing a gold ring on one of the fingers.

    ‘I checked the availability for re-incorporation,’ said Naomi. ‘They’ve got a large monkey, pretty similar to human and it’s got full mental capabilities. They could get it ready in a couple of days.’

    ‘Gives us time to rework the template,’ commented Carys, chewing on a croissant. I noticed there were flakes of pastry all over his bright red jumper. ‘Don’t mean to be rude, Paolo, but I think we overdid the state of blessed ignorance thing. Your mind’s a blank slate. That’s the reason you’re having nightmares.’

    ‘I think I’d rather not.’

    It was only in the silence that followed that I realised it was me who had spoken.

    ‘I mean – I’d lose everything since we arrived, wouldn’t I?’

    Naomi frowned. I noticed she also had pieces of pastry on her jumper, which was yellow. ‘We might be able to do a low-level transfer.’

    ‘Not to a different template,’ said Rick. ‘Some things are actually impossible, whether we like it or not.’ He looked up at me. ‘Half a day’s not much. How old are we? Nearly all of that billion days, isn’t it? 2.7 million years!’

    ‘Which is old enough to know better.’ It was Ava’s voice, curiously light and wobbly. She was standing by the table and had pulled a chair back. ‘Come on, Paolo, sit down and get some coffee at least. If you don’t want to restart, you don’t have to. We go on as we are.’ She smiled brightly at Rick. ‘Clematis walk in half an hour, yes?’

    The Clematis Walk begins with a single plant and a dark slab of stone. There is no inscription on the stone, just those bright crystals you can see in my picture. But all of us knew that in our previous state we would have experienced directly the words embedded in the fabric of its matter, the same words that are present in a trillion other stones throughout inhabited space:

    ‘FOR ALL THE DEAD’.

    It had been a long time since any part of our Company had been in a human body, but we all knew what to do – even me, with my blank slate of a mind. Without a word, we stopped and turned to face the stone, then stood, heads bowed, silent, for the pulse of sixty seconds.

    Then we walked on. Everywhere, there were Clematis – purple, green, magenta, white, cream, blue. Apparently it was the first plant to flower on the true Lunar surface, when they put the sky in.

    After a few minutes Carys dropped back, gently took my arm and said, ‘Sorry about what we said back there, Paolo. It was a bloody stupid idea. We’ll look after you.’

    Ava looked back over her shoulder, and her face was bright with a smile. She too slowed, took my other arm, and we walked on between the flowers.

  • We started the Art Trail!

    After dinner I did feel a bit better! And we climbed up to the top of the hill to see the ‘Colossal Statue’ of Old Father Moon, complete with his Old Moon halo. By now I’d sorted out how to use the phone camera and got this pretty good shot across the valley, just as the sun came up.

    Just to be clear about Lunar days – they are 29 Earth days long. So, sunrise to sunset is 14+ days, quite a long time. We’re planning to do the whole trail, 120 km, in that single day. I am hoping my legs will feel less wobbly soon…

    Old Father Moon is the beginning (or the end) of the Trail, the other end being another colossal statue, Lady Luna. So we’re progressing from male to female. ‘Just like civilisation’, says Ava, our Historian.

    I should explain about us. We were one, now we are six. We split our abilities and a limited amount of our memories amongst the our new, far less capable, human brains so as to be able to manage by communal effort, just like our ancestors at the beginning of the Expansion Era.

    So we are…

    Ava, our historian. One of the original human feeds to our Company was also a historian, and Ava was her name, so in some sense she has been re-created here.

    Darina, our relationship manger. She’s cheerful and outgoing and her job is to keep us all together and also ensure we get on with other corporeal consciousnesses, of which there are very many on the Moon.

    Naomi, our doctor. She needs to keep our human bodies comfortable, ensuring we get food, water and sleep as needed.

    Carys, our artist. His job is to appreciate the Art on the Art Trail and deep write his impressions for us to share later as a new Company (this is cheating a bit on the ‘only use old technology’ rule but there’s not much point going on an Art Trail if you don’t remember appreciating it).

    Rick, our trail leader. His job is to navigate the many hazards of this physical world and keep our bodies safe from accidental damage. As well as to keep us on schedule!

    And finally me. Paolo, with my digital phone camera device. My job is to be ignorant, to remember as little as possible of our former lives, so that everything here is wonderful to me.

    So far I’m sorry but that’s not happening. I just have sore legs, and now a bit of a sore tummy. I’m not sure that the body I’m in was properly prepared.

    But the statue was pretty impressive, I have to admit. And tomorrow we walk to Rocket Lake… sounds exciting. If I can sleep. I’m not sure how you do that.

  • We’ve Arrived!

    And it feels really really strange to be walking about like this. I mean, just half an hour ago – sorry, 55 years, 5 months and 10 days ago – we were, like, a Company in the Arcturus B-66-4 system. And we saw – felt – imagined (sorry, this language we decided to use is just *so* inadequate here) the Day Billion Art Trail, and Elon said, just go. You’ll be arriving so long after that you should be able to get a body ticket.

    And we did! We got 6! So we made 6 of us, with different characteristics, you know, male, female, tall, short, clever, stupid, that sort of thing. 55 years, 5 months and 10 days inactive riding on a beam of light and here we are.

    I think I got stupid. It’s taken me half an hour to work out how to use this authentic Expansion Era 1st Century phone digital camera thing and connect to the blog thing and type stuff and get a picture. Here’s the picture…

    Yep, that’s the beam of light we rode on. Just like Albert Einstein (says Ava).

    And I’m *tired*. Already. My legs ache from climbing that hill from the embodiment station, my eyes sting from the dust in the air, and something in my chest feels funny. I thought these bodies were ‘action ready’. How did anyone ever live like this?

    Ava and Rick say I’m probably just hungry. OK we’ll get something to eat and later maybe I’ll try to get pictures of us and tell you a bit more about the Art Trail.