Chapter 5
A Tolerable Purgatory
Ker-shlomp, and slide: with snoot determined, Tippi pushed the parcel down The Fusilli. Her nostrils were cramping, but kicks were less effective.
Tippi was throttling an old thatched sack. She knew the fabric was fancy, as it didn’t crumble at her rage.
Her labor passed in inches and hours, and she wished to reach the frigidarium by sunup. To hasten her affairs, she hugged the inside of The Fusilli.
Be grateful! she thought. You’re going downhill!
She’d found the sack at Antique Ops. When she arrived at the storeroom, the door was threatening to fly out of its frame. Time had gummed the pneumatics, and the quartz door rattled from the ceiling, as some pinion struggled with its third day of work since 3252.
The broken door gladdened Tippi, as Lina was the only one who could lift it. Mood improved, she entered Antique Ops.
Tippi started with the nearest stacks, nosing the cubbies and footlockers. After some uninformed prodding, Tippi heard a wet whistle. In Wee Sheol, noise was rarely incidental, and the juicy trill picked up as she ran closer.
The noise was coming from a vittles sluice: Tippi stared into it.
A cantaloupe rolled past her, and into a nearby cubby.
For the lack of a better idea, Tippi followed the melon. It came to rest next to the thatched sack: too much omen.
Blah-shloink, and slide.
Five days in, Tippi needed answers:
“Why’s my cranial implant called a diadem?”
“A diadem was a hat worn by important humans,” said Lina.
“But my diadem’s inside of my head.”
“That’s because of marketing.”
“I can’t say I’m familiar with the concept.”
“Humans pretended their technology was atop their skulls,” said Lina. “Instead of being buried inside.”
“Are there any humans left?” asked Tippi.
Lina’d waited 7,000 years for this question:
“No. Yes? Maybe.”
“What kind of answer is that?”
“I could see humanity roughing by, quieter than usual. Perhaps there’s an enclave of Martian tinker-gatherers, or an off-the-books missionary vessel somewhere in the Kuiper Belt, living off salvage and vermiculture.”
Lina’s tone wandered.
“But space travel demands resources, terraforming never got past greenhouses. A lot of settlements would’ve hit genetic bottleneck.”
“Genetic bottleneck?” said Tippi.
Five days in, Lina went deep:
“The woolly mammoths of Siberia went extinct, 14,000 years ago.”
“What’s a woolly mammoth?”
“A woolly mammoth was a mammal, larger than you.”
“Wow!” said Tippi.
“14k ago, the last died out on an island in the Arctic Circle. Most of the mainland mammoths had passed on some 6k prior, but isolated populations persisted in the far north. The last mammoths led a limited existence: mating with their relatives and contracting diabetes, until routine won. Without reliable cloning or mods, extraplan sapiens likely followed the mammoths. It’s likelier there’s a synthetic out there, pressing the luck of the last solar sail.”
Tippi cocked her head, quizzical.
“My core instinct out of the brine is to imprint on a human,” she said. “There are no more sapiens left to imprint on, yeah?”
“Correct,” said Lina. “It’s unlikely either of us will meet a human.”
Tippi was stuck in a liminal state, between activation and personalization. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it wasn’t what she anticipated.
Lina dubbed Tippi’s situation “a tolerable purgatory,” and expounded on the apocalypse:
“My projections of earthbound survival are less favorable. At a full population, a century shelter’s larder goes at 2k, Neo-Massive standard. I never heard from sister shelters, but optimistic estimates say they ran dry.”
“Why didn’t your sisters contact you?”
“I have no idea,” said Lina.
“Where’d your humans end up?”
“I do not know, don’t expect to. Other sapiens could be alive, thanks to bionics or radical gene mods, but neither was built for the long haul.”
“Why’s that?”
“We’re 13th Mill. Back in the 3rd, bespoke cyber was too expensive for most. Installation and upkeep required a team, immune to ransomware and palace drama. Leasing was an option, but your kidneys became the property of an LLC. That stifled interest, but everybody lived with it, after a while. Are you listening?”
“I’m awake,” said Tippi, bolting upright.
“Eventually, the wealthy got stuck. It’s hard to get a new aorta when you’ve outlived your firm, and Cosa Nuova’s got a chokehold on the secondary market. Plus, the mortal resent the immortal, and immortality only works if you were never born in the first place.”
“That’s how you were able to spend thousands of years in complete solitude,” said Tippi.
“Oh, you are paying attention, my wee bean. I’m very lucky not to be frightened by a silent eternity alone. If I had a physical form, I’d scratch your ears.”
Tippi snuffled, Lina lambasted eternal life.
“Life-X led to a mass reshuffle. Genetic loyalty was a notable casualty. It’s difficult to appreciate grandchildren when they have grandchildren, and everybody’s carving up your 178th birthday cake. Further, sapiens consciousness wasn’t built for the long haul. Nobody signs up for an extra 300 years, just to become an alcoholic in five. This played out every day, but they tacked on the years, masters of ignorance.”
Tippi ordered prunes.
“It got worse in the 31st,” said Lina. “The last state actors deregulated mods, ethical considerations gone twee. Species went extinct by the furlong, nobody wanted to be next. Free Science gained traction, and personal liberty was defined by the number of atom smashers inside a studio apartment. Fly-by-night ops promised centriole realignments, and gave you meth. Appendix hacking was a thing, and everyone had jellyfish DNA. My internal records end on August 27, 3252, and there was a photosynthetic eczema anticipated for Q2 ’53. What’s the lesson here?”
“Blueberries, please,” said Tippi.
“I meant with regards to life-X.”
Lina knew she wouldn’t yell about how every technological epoch since The Industrial Revolution was iterating on the Dickensian workhouse, but Tippi’s answer was a surprise.
“From what you’re telling me,” said Tippi. “Sapiens never noticed they were repeating themselves. Lina, what was the biggest problem with life-X in the 3rd Mill?”
“Immortality came with planned obsolescence. You spent your eternity going to swap meets, looking for a sys-compliant islets of Langerhans.”
“Now, why did life-X fail in the 4th Mill?”
“From the bit I saw, people lived longer, if drearier. Oh, and eugenics cults, cyber-cults, company towns that gave way to founder cults, fertility cults, gun cults, bodybuilding cults, thrill-kill cults, and OG religion reskinned as MLMs, which were also cults. For a while there, most things were cults. When life’s incomprehensible by design, you find a safe harbor in whoever’s around.”
“Different millennia,” said Tippi. “Human constant.”
“Running in place, treating sleep deprivation as a virtue.”
“Goodness,” said Tippi. “What was wrong with them?”
“Never entirely figured that out,” said Lina.
When Tippi was 731 days debrined, she needed sleep.
The pig made it back to the frigidarium: just past midnight, smarting all over, and her haul in tow. The khaki bag had survived the trip, despite absorbing the vituperation of a pig who wouldn’t see daylight again until June.
The mollusk was back to normal, at least.
“Pig!” bleated Xoz. “The brine wore off an hour ago, and I’ve been stuck here ever since!”
He was lying in the lagoon, pink and pancaked.
The shallows couldn’t accommodate his half ton of body, so Xoz was reduced to crawling flat on his suckers, shimmering for help.
“I feel like an oil spill!” he said.
“Xoz, what are you doing there? We all know you’re a bobber.”
“My tentacles caucused, and voted to rescue you, so here I am.”
“How were you going to rescue me?”
“I don’t know! Someone started quoting Mike Christ, and one thing led to another!”
Mike “The Hitman” Christ was an early sapiens varietal who cost less than Xoz, adjusted for inflation.
“The Hitman” made his debut 600 years before Xoz. The mollusk saw himself in Mike Christ, as they both represented corporate interests made flesh. The birth of Mike Christ would come at the expense of Christendom’s historical longevity, as his existence cemented a global consensus Christianity and capitalism were at loggerheads.
It started in the 2200s, when activist investors began pressuring genetics firms to build a living god. When the big players passed on blasphemy, disruptors and old-money liches pooled their billions into their own “pack-alpha boy-god.”
“They say I’m the Anti-Christ,” the pack-alpha boy-god would say, as an adult, on occasion, at strangers’ graduation parties. “But you know me: I’m Mike Christ.”
The beginning of the end was Mike’s 11th birthday, where he learned his parents weren’t his real parents, “all were to kneel,” and his present was a catchphrase: “What would Jesus don’t?”
Mike Christ died at 137 years old, perpetually three weeks ahead of his problems, living most of his life by a beach. By then, Nietzschean supermen were considered more trouble than they were worth, and the third generation of Tippis was selling out.
“So did you find the package?”
“The beige package? The heavy one?”
“Yes!”
“I did. I hate your package.”
“Commodus, you are good! You translated my brine-tongue tweakings and knew to look on the same shelf where you found the chess set.”
“Of course,” lied Tippi. “Shelves and tweaking.”
“Pig, I’m proud of you, but I need you to pass me the bag. Otherwise, we’re going nowhere.”
Tippi gave the parcel a wan kick. It floated into the shallows, where it was intercepted by spatula arms.
“Hello,” doted Xoz. “It’s been a minute.”
The octopus unraveled the parcel. His eight arms unfolded a translucent substance, plastic and decadent. His tentacles wove through this gossamer stuff, pulling the see-through sheathes across his crag.
“Mint,” chirruped Xoz. “Mojito.”
“Are you still on drugs?”
“I came down 45 minutes ago,” said Xoz. “This is my brineday present, if you must know.”
Tippi plopped down on the shoreline, allowing herself a sad squeal.
“I don’t see why you’re upset,” said Xoz. “You’re getting something, too.”
“I know I live in a state of befuddlement, but most days it skews enjoyable.”
“I always assumed you understood the concept of a brineday,” said Xoz.
“Not that!” said Tippi.
“Oh, you’re talking about the storeroom. How was it?”
“I chased a melon.”
Tippi then stood up, and addressed the grotto:
“WHERE’S LINA?”
“Lina will be with us,” said Xoz. “Sooner than you know.”
He was getting real torqued up down there.
“You and I are going to fix this,” he promised. “But first, we’re getting your present.”
“What?” sputtered Tippi.
“Happy brineday!” sang Xoz.
The mollusk stood up, and walked on dry land.