The Mastodon Chronicles

Tag: Art

  • Butterfly Ballet

    I had never heard music before. There was a whole orchestra, many different players, most human but some in slightly different forms, in an amphitheatre of soft old wood in a fold of the forest warmed by the evening sun. You didn’t need to sit down: we just wandered the paths around the orchestra, listening to the sound through the trees and watching the butterflies dancing.

    It should have been idyllic, but I still wasn’t feeling idyllic. The day long climb up the escarpment wall, the path winding through the woods, Carys fascinating about the statues and paintings and plasmaworks that we passed, Naomi and Ava walking on either side of me like guards, Darina and Rick chatting and laughing, and all I could think about was how they had become one person, made a decision, and left me out of it.

    And the music was actually confusing, too. The threads of melody, the harmony, the different sounds of the orchestra – some of it sounded good, some of it dissonant and chaotic.

    The ballet caught my attention though. The synchronised pulses of butterflies moving through the air, now a thousand, now just one, peeling off to dance in small segments amongst the scattered audience. I could see a story unfolding: clouds of white butterflies at the start, a huge coloured butterfly joining them, and gradually the butterflies all became a mixture of colours – red, gold, purple, swirling and mixing and sometimes colliding – but then towards the end they were all the same again, white and deep brown with a flash of orange, flying in perfect sync.

    I wanted to ask Carys about the symbolism, but he was unusually quiet, even after it was over and the music had stopped.

    As we walked away, I became separated from the others – probably because I wasn’t really trying to follow them. They would be gone in a couple of days, except one – Naomi or Ava? They’d asked me a couple of times and I’d said I couldn’t decide, but in fact I didn’t really care. Whichever one, they wouldn’t really want to be there. It was a duty, for a person who would rather be somewhere else.

    ‘Did you enjoy the performance?’ I jumped. The deep bass voice came from a copper-covered humanoid machine carrying a large matching instrument that after a few seconds I identified as a tuba.

    A small white-and-buff butterfly was perched on the shoulder of the robot. It twitched its wings.

    ‘Ummm… I found the music a bit confusing but I liked the dancing.’

    The wings twitched again. ‘You are not on the Link. Do you need help finding your friends?’

    ‘They’re not…’ I began, and then almost choked and started crying. And then, through sobs, I told the whole story to whoever this was, the butterfly, the robot, both, the whole ballet company for all I knew, I told them about our arrival, my blank slate, the threat of a restart, Carys and his art, Ava and her caring, Naomi and her science, Rick and his personality transplant, and then how they’d all merged themselves and decided that most of them were going home whether I liked it or not.

    When my words stumbled to a halt, the deep voice said, ‘And you’re only two weeks old?’

    Footsteps behind me: Naomi. ‘Yes, just two weeks,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a childright for him and he’s in our care.’ A slight frown crossed her face, and I knew she had added more information on the Link.

    She steered me away, down the now quiet path, ‘The overnight’s only a few minutes away,’ she told me.

    She sounded businesslike, but also a bit upset. So I didn’t say anything, just walked behind her, a little afraid to look back.

    Later, sitting on my bed, I opened my phone to look at the pictures I’d taken at the ballet. On the screen were various icons: part of my Knowing was that I could use them to connect to people, talk to them at a distance using the phone. There were slightly cartoonish caricatures of my companions, an icon for the camera, and some others to extend my Knowing, most of which I hadn’t used.

    But now there was a new icon in the bottom left corner of the screen:

    I got up several times in the night and looked at it, wondered if I should press it. I’m not even sure if it’s a link to Knowing or just a link to the ballet company.

    And today I have to decide. Is it Ava or Naomi? Or even Carys, or Rick, or Darina? Who is going to stay with me?

  • Cages

    ‘Do you think you’ll be all right outside for a bit?’

    Carys and I were standing by one of the huge airlocks that led out of the dome to the Central Plain beyond. Of course there was just as much air outside as inside now, and creepers were growing around the controls, but the original of this towering steel space would have been filled with machines of all sizes, and even a few humans in protective suits, or travelling inside the machines.

    ‘There’s a bit of the Art Trail I want to show you,’ Carys went on.

    I decided I would try. If I was going to stay here, I would have to get used to it.

    Once we were through the lock, the sun hit my face and I felt a lurch of panic in my stomach. I took a breath. The air was hot. I was standing on a stony plain, with small tussocks of dry grass here and there. Heat shimmered, distorting the narrow horizon.

    ‘It’s only over here.’ Carys was walking towards what looked like a red brick wall snaking across the dry plain. It was a couple of hundred metres, so I just followed him.

    I felt OK. Sweating a little, anxious, but not dizzy or buzzy in any way.

    Thanks, Naomi.

    There was no gate in the wall, but Carys just walked through. I hesitated, then followed him. There was no sensation of touching anything at all: the wall just wasn’t there as a solid object.

    Inside were cages.

    Perhaps a hundred of them, with what looked like dead plants sunk into the ground between them. Some of the cage doors were open, some were closed. I noticed that the ground was now red, more like Mars than the Moon. I remembered Mars Hill, and felt the sweat on my forehead starting to trickle down my face. I turned to go back to the dome and…

    Ran into a brick wall. From this side, it was solid.

    I was shaking now.

    Carys put a hand on my arm. ‘You OK?’

    ‘I’m starting to feel a bit wobbly,’ I admitted. ‘How do you get back through the wall?’

    There was a fractional pause where Carys seemed to be looking into the distance. I guessed he was checking with Naomi.

    ‘OK, so we’ll do this quickly,’ he said. ‘You get in one of the cages.’

    I went to one of the open doors and stepped inside. I could feel the heat radiating from the metal on the floor.

    Carys joined me and closed the door. I felt the panic rising – but was jolted out of it by a change of view.

    The other cages were gone. The wall was gone. The vast domes towering into the sky were gone. Instead, the red plain dotted with dead plants just went on, and on, and on, to a seemingly infinite horizon.

    ‘Where -?’

    ‘Dimensional trick,’ said Carys. ‘It’s a bubbleverse. But do you see the art of it?’

    ‘Can we just get out? How do we get back?’ My voice was a little shaky.

    Carys just opened the cage door and walked out. I almost pushed him over in my eagerness to follow…

    And we were back on the Central Plain, the domes and the airlock in front of us, the red brick wall behind us. There was no sign of the cage.

    Carys got me inside the domes again, and sat me down in a small cool cafe with blue metal chairs. Darina and Rick were there, sharing a pink cold drink from a tall glass, using a pair of long straws.

    ‘Of course there’s another way out,’ said Carys after a while.

    Rick laughed. ‘I know. We tried it.’

    ‘You climb up the wall,’ said Darina. ‘It’s easy enough, it’s only a couple of metres. An anthrozeb could jump it in this gravity.’

    Rick was still grinning. ‘But you end up in the same place. An infinite plain, hot and dry, no water. So you have to go back.’

    ‘The only way out is a cage,’ said Carys. ‘See what I mean?’

    I took a slurp of the fizzy, sweet drink they’d given me. ‘Sorry but I don’t.’ I was still feeling a bit shaky. I wished Ava was there.

    ‘Leave him alone, Carys,’ said Darina. ‘He doesn’t get it. And to be honest I’m not sure I do.’

    ‘If you are everything, you are also nothing,’ said Carys. ‘Your limitations are your cell walls.’

    Rick was laughing. ‘I suppose we knew an artist would be a pain,’ he said. ‘That’s why we named him after tooth decay!’

    To my surprise Carys was laughing too. ‘Yes, and I had to look that one up, too. You cut the memory clean out of my template!’ He winked at me. ‘At least you got a standard name.’

    I stared at my dark drink fizzing in its tall glass. They had cut all the memory out of my template. Had they thought that was a joke too? Was that why Rick had behaved like he did? At least they were trying to look after me now, but…

    I didn’t belong with them. I wanted to get up, walk away from the table and start talking to lizards.

    Instead I asked, ‘What does “Ava” mean?’

    But they didn’t know.

    I’m writing this at Little Crater Lake, where we’re going spend a couple of days. There are nice, comfortable, wooden huts in the woods around the lake, and we have one each.

    Ava has explained how she’s made it possible for me to stay on the Moon as myself, in my own body, but I need a break, so I’ll tell you about it later. For now, I’m going to take a walk around the crater wall above the lake.

    On my own. I need to do some thinking.

  • The City

    The Yellow Brick Road Gallery

    I slept most of the morning today. In the afternoon I went to the Yellow Brick Road Gallery with Carys and Ava. Rick, Naomi and Darina had decided to go back to the surface and climb the central peak. I remembered Ava’s protective anger last night and wondered if she was anything to do with that decision.

    The Yellow Brick Road Gallery is the tallest building in New Copernicus. It’s actually attached to the solid “sky” at the top, though you can’t see it properly in the picture because of the sky lighting (they call it the ‘fake blue’ round here, apparently).

    I don’t know why, perhaps it was my quiet room, but I hadn’t expected New Copernicus to be quite so big. The style, with the tall buildings, air conditioning, mass transit systems, and of course vast numbers of embodied people, is that of the 1st Century EE. In fact, the whole thing was built and populated as part of the build up to the Day Billion celebrations, starting only about 400 years ago. It has around 60 million embodied inhabitants, most of them human, and space for another 20 million or so as visitors like us.

    It felt like quite a lot of those people were in the Gallery. There was a huge sign in the entrance, ‘A Billion Days of Art’. Carys told me there were over ten thousand exhibits, or one for every few hundred years. ‘It definitely beats the Art Trail,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we came here.’

    The first ten floors were dedicated to art relevant to the 1st millennium EE, a century to each floor. There was genetic art, living art, objects made of bone, stone, wood, air, superheated plasma, even little knots of symmetry distortion. Some were recent originals in the ancient artistic styles, some were replicas of art from the time, and one or two were actual 1st millennium artworks, preserved behind careful barriers, their decay prevented at a molecular level. It was fascinating, but exhausting. After a couple of hours, despite two lots of coffee and cake, I’d had enough.

    Ava walked back to the hotel with me, leaving Carys to explore the upper levels, or at least some of them.

    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said as we manoeuvred our way along the crowded street. ‘I didn’t want to drag you away. Perhaps I really am a liability.’

    ‘No, you’re not,’ she said. ‘Carys is happy looking at all that art he wouldn’t have seen otherwise, Rick and Naomi and Darina are happy climbing and not having to bother about art, and I’m happy just looking after you.’

    She stopped in the middle of the road and kissed me lightly on the cheek. I was so confused I collided with someone and had to apologise again.

    I wanted to ask Ava why looking after me made her feel happy, but when we got to the hotel I was so tired that I fell asleep again almost immediately. So a bit of a waste of a day, really. But I did get a few pictures in the Gallery, I think these are the best.

    Sorry I didn’t get the names of them. I’ll try to find out tomorrow.

  • 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.

  • 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.