SOMA Short Stories -

__SOMA__.md

SOMA Short Stories

Make sure to play SOMA first!

Taken from https://somagame.com to save them from being lost.

a_beast_like_any_other.txt

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   | A Beast Like Any Other |
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  Gavin felt dizzy. He was on the floor, inhaling the burning electric smell that permeated the area. The cold metal surface was soothing. He fought the urge to pass out.
  “Gavin, are you with me?”
  It was the voice of Louise Meuron, a colleague and fellow field service technician. Gavin pushed himself up from the floor with effort. His muscles were sore. He looked at Meuron. Her face and hair were partially smeared with structure gel.
  “What happened?” asked Gavin.
  Meuron’s face lit up as with great relief. She staggered across the room holding her side. “Pipe explosion.”
  “Of course.”
  “We have to activate the turbo batteries.”
  “I remember.”
  “I’m not sure how we’re supposed to make it. Need to get to the other side of the machine hangars to reach the battery park. There are so many robots in the way. They could all be psychotic – out to kill us. No way to know.”
  Gavin nodded. It wasn’t just the machine hangars, Upsilon was now littered with rogue machines and robots. It had been hell trying to stay clear of the erratic machines while still doing your job. Even the non-aggressive ones were a problem, their strength and spastic movements were a perfect formula for causing disastrous accidents. So far there hadn’t been any deaths, but it was clear that it was just a matter of time. They had to find a way out of this, and turning on the batteries was the first step.
  “We have to get the batteries activated,” said Meuron.
  “I know.”
  “Then Carl and Amy will set up the automated production to keep the plant running after we’ve evacuated.”
  “I know. Get the power under control and then get the hell out. Rest when we get to Theta.”
  Meuron still looked worried, but she nodded and peered into the next room. “Come on, let’s move.”
  Gavin followed Meuron as she staggered. They moved through Upsilon’s stark factory floors, climbing over a couple of dismantled universal helpers and a broken loader. It wasn’t the people at Upsilon that had taken them apart, it was the insanity spreading among the robots that made them turn on each other. The robots often fought, all the while screaming with maddened human voices. No one knew what what made them that way. It was just another of the many calamities that had struck Pathos-II and its sites and it was getting worse every day. The robots at the station were powerful beasts of burden that together could move mountains, but only when they were working with clear directions. The robots at Theta and the other sites were easily disarmed, but at Upsilon there were so many. The manufacturing plant just kept making more before it was finally shut down by the staff a few days ago. Thankfully most of the robots produced were for underwater work and simply couldn’t move effectively inside, but there were probably still a hundred rogue machines walking the vast network of corridors and halls at Upsilon and it was best to avoid them altogether.
  “Are you kidding me?” Meuron was frustrated. They had stopped in front of a locked door. She was swiping her omnitool at the panel, but nothing was happening.
  “What’s wrong?”
  “The security profile is fucked.”
  “Try pulling the tool chip and plugging it back in again.”
  “No, it’s not that, someone – or something – changed the cipher.”
  “Cut the power. We’ll pull it open.”
  Meuron popped a maintenance panel open and started working a set of wires. Gavin stepped up towards the door and tried pulling it open. It was loose.
  Sparks burst from the wires as Gavin forced the door open by hand. Meuron fell back against the wall as she dodged the failing circuitry. Gavin, impressed by his simple solution, looked down on Meuron who was sitting on the floor next to him. She looked shocked.
  “Sorry, I just thought it was worth a try.” He smiled.
  Gavin gave Meuron a hand and pulled her to her feet. He’d never thought about how small she was compared to him.
  She must be shorter than 5 feet.
  “Good job,” she wheezed, catching her breath.
  They kept moving. They were getting closer to their goal. The backup system was a giant hangar-sized hall filled with what were simply referred to as turbo batteries. The technical definition was probably something dull that didn’t convey their incredibly power. Fully loaded they could keep the whole station running for months without the need for producing more power. When the geothermal plant was constructed some forty years ago, it was not considered reliable enough to be entirely trusted, so the batteries were put in so that if power production failed, the station would not go completely dark. Over the last ten years or so the production had become so stable that the batteries became effectively redundant. Luckily no one would benefit from dismantling them, so they remained unused, stuck in the oldest part of Upsilon.
  The sections ahead were machine hangars, all large open spaces with literally tons of potentially infested machinery in their way. To avoid dodging between the unpredictable machines, they continued up a staircase and crossed the hangar via narrow walkways high above the ground floor.
  “Have you been here before?” asked Gavin.
  “I don’t think so. Most of this stuff was built and forgotten about way before I got here.”
  Up on the walkways they were able to cover a lot of ground without risking the attention of the machines. Below them they could see container-sized loaders move about, frustrated and without purpose.
  Gavin and Meuron spotted the entrance to the battery hall and descended a staircase leading down towards the main floor. A large UH-unit ambled close to the landing. Depending on how much they were moving, one tactic was to simply walk up to the robot, reach in between the body parts and pull the tetra cord that would instantly pacify the machine. The danger being if you weren’t fast enough the robot might pivot its torso and potentially crush your lower arm. Many of the staff had suffered various degrees of such injuries and it had even prompted some to come up with makeshift armor to wear on the arms.
  “Come on, let’s just rush past it towards the gate,” whispered Meuron, clutching her omnitool.
  “Wait, if the omnitool didn’t work before, we can’t trust it now. You need to upgrade it, remember? I’ll just take out the helper and we can work the door in peace.”
  “Okay, just be quiet. There’s a lot of machines down this hall that might come running if they hear something.”
  Gavin nodded and sneaked towards the UH. It was a large one, a model often called the Kodiak as it was the size of a bear and could effortlessly switch between standing on two or four legs.
  He had done it a few times before, but it was always scary. It felt like sneaking up on a wild animal.
  Gavin looked back at Meuron only to see that she’d already moved on. She was by the door popping a panel in the floor – accessing a valve that would slowly pry the gate open. Gavin rolled his eyes at the unnecessary risk she was taking, but kept focused on the beast in front of him. The robot swayed ever so lightly as it rose and stabilized its massive weight on its two rigid hind legs.
  Gavin jumped forward, shoved his arm in between the moving parts and tried to reach the tetra cord. He didn’t get it.
  The Kodiak swung around. Gavin panicked; as the heavy engine parts closed on his arm, he pulled it out as fast as he could, using the other arm to brace himself against the Kodiak’s armor plates. Before he knew what had happened the Kodiak staggered and they both fell to the ground. He saw his chance and plunged his arm back in between the moving parts. The Kodiak screamed in a scrambled digital mess of a voice as Gavin grabbed the tetra cord and pulled. The machine collapsed in a dead husk of scrap metal. Gavin got back on his feet clenching the tetra cord in triumph.
  He felt incredibly lucky. He couldn’t believe he’d got out of that. It was like dropping a live grenade on the ground and by the grace of god being able to pick it back up and throw it away before it blew him apart.
  Proud of his accomplishment, Gavin looked back at the gate Meuron was forcing. She wasn’t there. She’d managed to open it enough to slip inside the battery halls already.
  Gavin hurried over and squeezed himself through the narrow gap Meuron had settled for. Inside was the turbo battery park that he had been hearing about. It was huge, but uninteresting, a collection of containers evenly spaced across the floor. Gavin had come in on a mezzanine floor so he had a perfect view over the hall. Meuron had made her way to a control room on the same floor. Gavin followed her steps and as he came up behind her she swung around with a large monkey wrench almost hitting him in the chest.
  “Christ, take it easy. It’s just me.”
  Meuron calmed as she realized who it was. “Don’t scare me like that.”
  “Me? I’m not the one abandoning their friends while they’re fighting Kodiaks.”
  “Yeah, well… I’m sorry. This is important.”
  Meuron turned back to the controls and started hitting switches, booting an old terminal that seemed to have an entirely different system from the rest of the station.
  “Can you get it running?”
  “Yeah, it’s not a problem. Just keep your eyes open on the gate, okay? Don’t want the machines to even know about this stuff.”
  “How can we be sure that this place won’t be affected by the same crazy that the rest is suffering from?”
  “There’s not a lot of artificial intelligence here. It’s all very basic stuff. It shouldn’t get infected.”
  “But what if some robots just decide to walk in here, tearing this place apart?”
  “Let’s hope they enjoy electricity as much as we do.”
  Suddenly the hall lit up with sharp cracks echoing inside. Gauges and meters snapped into position.
  Meuron nodded. “It’s working.”

  Gavin and Meuron made their way back. With their mission completed it was just a matter of not getting in the way of anything violent. Their long walk was accompanied by the usual strange voices and screams from corrupted minds stuck in bodies they couldn’t cope with. The danger of Upsilon wasn’t just the unpredictability of the machines, but the psychological agony of constantly hearing people you knew in pain. You just had to keep telling yourself it wasn’t real. It wasn’t them. It’s just robots.
  “Come on, guys. The tool chip failed me. I need a security update!” yelled Meuron as she banged the door leading into the nest.
  The door opened. Meuron quickly entered and Gavin followed. The group inside were familar, but there was something wrong. There was chief factor Jane Adams, of course – Carl, Amy, Shank, Jonsy, Rogers, and… Gavin?
  “Get the tetra. Quick.”
  Gavin didn’t understand what was happening. Carl leaped towards him and sank his arm into Gavin’s stomach.
  Where was the blood?
  “What are you doing?” asked Gavin in shock. “Who is that?” He pointed towards the other Gavin.
  “Got it. Almost.” Carl pulled a cord from Gavin’s stomach. It looked weird. Gavin couldn’t move anymore. He was getting really scared. He looked to Meuron. She was avoiding him, trying to look away.
  “Meuron! What’s happening to me?”
  “It’s okay, man,” answered Carl and reached back into the stomach. “It’ll be over soon.”
  Gavin couldn’t make this scene into anything believable. What the hell was happening? The people in the room looked uncomfortable, disgusted even. Meuron was in tears. The other Gavin looked rigid with stress. “Just kill it already!”
  It? That can’t be right. I just helped out with the plan. We were getting out. I’m the real Gavin, right? I have to be. I am me. I am Gavin Finley, field service technician stationed at Upsilon, Pathos-II. I’m a real person. I am —
  

good_bye_mr_munshi.txt

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   | Good Bye Mr Munshi |
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  Professor David Munshi struggled to fit the last of his many framed diplomas into the cardboard box which had kindly been provided by his former employer, Dartmouth College. He pushed aside his Newton’s cradle, a gift he had received many years ago from some organization he’d forgotten the name of, to fit in the oversized frame. He sighed out of frustration, wondering why he even wanted to keep them. Why would an old man need a framed piece of paper telling him what field he was once relevant in? He tried to imagine himself looking at it in a year or two. Would he feel pride, perhaps confidence, by being reminded of his lifelong occupation? Or would he grieve for it? It was too early to decide, he thought. He would need to keep the damn thing. He would need to keep it all for a while, at least until he grounded himself in his new life as a retiree.
  Munshi sat back in his old chair and looked around the room. The shelves were empty. He had been taking home a couple of books every night to avoid needing to carry them all in one go. The computer, he’d be happy to leave behind. It was one of those highly secured ones that was constantly being monitored and backed up. David didn’t like it at all. “Let me finish my thoughts before you read them,” he would say to anyone who would listen. To most people it was second nature and they would dismiss it as the words of an old man fighting back against his own age.
  The one thing David would miss about his office was the view. From his window he would watch campus life unfold. He enjoyed watching the students go from blind innocence to adults – or at least something like it.
  There was knock at the door. It was one of the janitors, Clay. “Do you need any help with your things, Dr. Munshi?”
  “Thank you, Mr. Clay.” David nodded towards the cardboard box on his table with the framed diplomas only halfway inside.
  “We could send it to your house, if you want.”
  “That’s all right, it’s just the one box.”
  Clay picked up the box, and they both left the office. They moved through the corridors in silence, out through the main door and across the yard towards the parking lot. Clay carefully packed the cardboard box into the trunk of the car; then he cleared his throat. “You could still get one, you know. It usually takes a while.”
  David managed to look confused. He wasn’t at all, but he didn’t want to acknowledge what he knew was coming. “The Nobel prize,” said Clay. “It usually takes a while.”
  There it was, the one reason he’d held off from retiring for so long. David was well into his seventies and he was only now letting go. “Of course. Thank you, Mr. Clay.”

  Life goes faster when you are old. Time is measured against the years you’ve already spent in this world. When you have lived seventy years one extra year doesn’t seem that long. It’s just another lap around the sun, four seasons swiftly replacing each other. When you are young a year can seem like an eternity. Munshi could remember being a child hearing about some upcoming movie or video game. It’s coming out in six months? My god, how will I ever survive? Time is precious yet we so often want it go faster. We waste it hoping that life will somehow be better later on. However, Munshi couldn’t remember what it was like being really young, before one grasped the concept of time passing. Was I fully present then? Perhaps it was the only time in my life I wasn’t waiting for something to change. I simply was.
  “Dr. Munshi?”
  David realized he was lost in his own thoughts. How long had the young man from the newspapers been patiently waiting for his answer? David looked around his living room; the new furniture he had bought last year still looked dull. It was the lighting, wasn’t it?
  “Do you want to take a break?” asked the young man on his couch. His name was Andrew Mackrell and he was trying his best to find a story among Munshi’s scattered thoughts.
  “No, let’s continue. You were asking about Simon Jarrett.”
  “You mentioned that bringing him back to life led to the development of artificial intuition – that he was your motivation to basically change the world of robotics. Could you elaborate?”
  David sighed as he recognized the quotation. It was from an interview made over thirty years ago. Those words had hounded him through every interview since.
  “Look, it’s a good story. It was almost turned into a movie at one point. But the truth is that Simon was simply the first person that made me truly consider what a neurograph was. We were making these scans, not really thinking about what it was...”
  “With your partner, Dr. Berg?”
  “Yes, Paul and I thought of it like information, which it technically is, but the wording does it disservice. It’s like saying humans are just machines or matter is simply waves. Reducing a concept, a holistic entity like that fails to acknowledge the complex mechanisms that enables it to exist in the context of human perception.”
  Mr. Mackrell had stopped taking notes with his small digital pad. David had lost him somewhere along the way.
  “What is your expertise, Mr. Mackrell?”
  “My what?”
  “Your particular strand of journalism. Do you often write about artificial intelligence?”
  “I write human interest stories.”
  “You mean those stories about people saving cats or running a soup kitchen?”
  “We can’t all be writing about science, Dr. Munshi. I’m not here to write about your work, I’m here to write about you. I want to know what makes you tick, what made you devote your life to robotics.”
  David felt his pride fall away. Mr. Mackrell didn’t understand who he was neither did he have any preconceived notions of what his supposed narrative was. He was looking for it using old quotations uttered decades ago. Maybe this was his opportunity to set it straight.
  “Curiosity, Mr. Mackrell. Just like any other scientist. I’m not the angst-filled doctor desperately looking for a way to bring back his long lost friend that many seems to think I am. It’s true that Simon was my first test subject. He died. And it was sad, but not life changing. The work Paul and I did in Toronto was extensive and there were many steps between the first neurograph and the development of artificial intuition.”
  Mr. Mackrell was thrown. He went back to his notes. “So, your work has been constant? No surprises.”
  “No surprises.” David sounded confident.
  “What about the death of your partner, Dr. Berg?”
  “I don’t want to talk about Paul.” David was surprised how loud he sounded. Was he offended or just frustrated?
  “You were life-long-” began Mr. Mackrell.
  “Work has been constant. Life hasn’t.”
  David felt out of place, uncomfortable, simply by being himself. He looked around the room, his own living room, he couldn’t come to terms with his own choice of furniture. He couldn’t understand why he would accept to do this interview. Who was this David who thought this was a good idea, who was this person who thought leaving his job would make him happy?
  “Would you bring back Paul if you could?”
  “What?” David sounded baffled.
  “You were saying that your work wasn’t fueled by the need to bring back Simon Jarrett, I was thinking maybe you had such thoughts about Paul?”
  David wasn’t angry. He was perplexed by Mr. Mackrell’s rambling thoughts and how they were able to trigger a torrent of memories and unresolved feelings – but still be so utterly stupid.
  “You can’t bring back the dead.”
  “I know that,” tried Mr. Mackrell, “I was thinking of putting his brain scan into a computer or a robot. Wouldn’t something like that be possible – in theory?”
  “In it’s truest sense? No. There is no way to build a human, for we are a process, a continuation within the greater context of a living world. You are not just your mind, but your body and the experiences of the two, in a certain time, in a certain place. Could we make a machine think it’s Simon, or Paul? Perhaps. But it wouldn’t be them.”
  Mackrell thumbed through his notes, peering at the wording, looking concerned. “I’m confused, the post-humanist proponents seems confident that this is where we are headed. That we would replace our organic bodies with circuitry.”
  “There are many people in this world who fool themselves with promises which can’t be fulfilled.”
  Mackrell was clearly struggling.
  David sighed. “If you somehow were able to activate a neuroscan in a way that it would continue to project the subject’s subjective experience and feed it back we could possibly sustain an intelligence that thinks it is Simon or whoever. The problem is that the mind is simply not the whole human. Think what would happen when he realizes that he no longer has the body that he identifies with and that he is in a place or a time that doesn’t fit with his continuing timeline. If he didn’t go mad on the spot, he would simply have to surrender to the fact that he is something completely new. He wouldn’t be human, he would be a new entity thinking he was Simon.”
  Mackrell looked out of sorts; no doubt trying to concoct some sort of story he could hand over to his editor. It looked like he was failing. “Is there something like good enough?”
  “In terms of being human?”
  “Yes.”
  Munshi was surprised to find himself at a loss. He wanted to confidently argue that being a little bit human was like being a little bit pregnant. It just didn’t work.
  “What if Simon or Paul, stuck in a robot shell, claimed to be happy. Would that mean nothing?”
  Munshi sat quiet for a while. Rare memories of Paul expressing joy rushed through him. Mackrell continued to fumble with his uneducated thoughts:
  “I realize he wouldn’t be strictly human, but if he said he was happy and you accepted him as a being. Sympathy doesn’t stop at our own species. I would say I love my wife very much. I don’t think a technicality such as not being human would ever stop me from caring, you know? It’s not just my wife being what she is, it’s what we have between us. Perhaps not everything worth preserving or transferring comes from within, but is constantly created and maintained in moments. If that was still a possibility, I don’t think it would matter to me what she was.”
  Munshi smiled, surprised by the young mans emotional ranting, but he wasn’t convinced it added anything to his perspective. However, there was something new in the conversation. He started to enjoy it. He wanted to encourage the young man’s train of thought, but it was a sensitive example to explore. “And what if you had already seen your wife die? Would you accept a new version of her?”
  “I… I think I would.”
  “You don’t think it would be selfish to replace her? She wouldn’t be the real her.”
  “In body she wouldn’t, but as long as her mind was sound, I think it wouldn’t be selfish. We would be happy. Even if it wasn’t her, it would be us. Does that make sense?”
  Munshi smiled, holding back a laugh.
  “Is that a childish way of looking at it?” asked Mackrell.
  “No. Not at all. It just shows how complicated it all is.”
  Mackrell sighed and scrolled through his notes again. He shook his head ruefully.
  “Is there anything else, Mr. Mackrell?” asked Munshi.
  “No. I think I might have just enough to make an article.”
  “A short one, maybe?”
  Mackrell laughed and nodded. They shook hands and Mackrell left.
  Munshi paced around his house excited for a few minutes and then finally grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper from his printer. He started writing: Good Enough - The Limits of Being Human, by Dr. David Munshi
  He looked at it on the page for a while, feeling the rush of excitement of going to work on something new. Then he remembered Paul Berg and that he was dead and that he himself was old, without a laboratory.
  David let out a breath, then tossed the paper into the trash can.

how_to_climb_a_mountain.txt

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   | How to Climb a Mountain |
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  Antjie Coetzee had been working at Tau for years. She didn’t particularly like it, but the money was good and it wasn’t that stressful. Her job was that of a gunner, working the Omega Space Gun, launching satellites and space probes. Most of her time was spent preparing for launches: making sure the payload was secure, that the casing would hold up, checking weather stats, and doing ballistics calculations. The actual firing of the gun, the one thing her title focused on, was absolutely trivial. Sitting comfortably in her Pilot Seat she would with the flip of a switch push a ton of steel and circuitry up through an extensive tunnel lined with electromagnets continuously accelerating the payload to escape velocity.
  Every launch was an amazing feat of engineering, but from Coetzee’s point of view it was banal. She would hit a switch, hear the bombastic sounds of the payload shooting off, and then soon after she would get a video feed of the thing leaving the barrel followed by an automated confirmation: launch successful. Then there would be a string of information specific for that mission. The launch message was generated and broadcasted by a surface platform known simply as Omega. Omega was like Phi that it didn’t have a standing staff. But unlike Phi it didn’t have any workers either. Almost everyday Coetzee would walk through the connector tunnel from Tau to Phi in order to work, so in a way it was populated almost at all times. Omega, on the other hand, was just a fixture point for the Space Gun and didn't need any supervision.
  Coetzee had heard about the Curie going there occasionally to perform maintenance or check something or the other, but to her it just felt like a very solitary and vacant place. She found herself trying to get a sense of what it was like up there whenever they launched something. The video feed that would pop up on her HUD intrigued her and she often tried to imagine what it would be like to be up there, alone in the middle of the ocean. It had to be better than down here, right?
  She had been thinking about it a lot lately. It had been a year since the comet killed the planet, shot down communication between the abyss and the plateau, and activated WAU in the most devastating way possible.
  Coetzee’s colleague, Tsiolkovsky, used to say that being buried alive would be a step up for the people at Tau. At least then you knew you were dead. In the abyss, looking up at the dark water pushing down on you, you couldn’t help but feel that there was light way up there, somewhere. It wasn’t for you, but it did translate into a tiny amount of hope and that hope kept you from accepting a peaceful death and instead perpetuate a futile struggle for survival.
  Coetzee had, unlike the others, given into the idea of dying. She was no longer concerned about a life after death, since in this case there wasn’t much life before death either. What Coetzee struggled with was to try to find an end that she could accept without feeling like a failure. What she wanted wasn’t anything dramatic. She just wanted to feel something that wasn’t frustration, pain, or hunger. She wanted to feel genuine in the way that she could recognize her feelings as not something that of an animal, but a human being with dignity and honor.

  It was those video feeds from the lone Omega platform that inspired her to do what she did that day.
  Coetzee watched the last few videos generated during the final launches. The screen would shake and then pan side-to-side to show marker buoys on the horizon. But Coetzee was watching that sliver of the Omega platform that got caught in the video. There was something so inviting about it – peaceful. That’s when she realized what she wanted to do. She wanted to go there.
  It was a crazy undertaking – it had never been done before and it would never be tried again. She was going to climb it. She felt herself getting excited by the prospect of making her way to the surface. It would be a one way street, for sure, but she was okay with that. More than okay with it. As she thought about it she couldn’t even consider wanting to go back into the abyss again, even if the surface was all in flames.
  The Omega Space Gun barrel was not a straight vertical line towards the surface, it was a slope spanning more than five kilometers. It was going to be a long climb, but she figured it could be done. At first it seemed like climbing inside the barrel would be the safest bet, but considering its construction – divided into vacuum filled sections with multiple locks – it all seemed too complicated. Even if she sabotaged the gun and filled it with water the slippery surface would make it too difficult to traverse. No, it had to be climbed on the outside, she would have to climb it like a mountain.

  Coetzee set off in her Power Suit, carrying three extra tanks of oxygen and a technician’s tool belt. It was surprisingly easy to climb, but it was exhausting. The constant angle of the barrel made it feel like she was climbing the longest staircase in the world.
  She thought back on her childhood, hiking with her parents on the Tafelberg just out of Cape Town. She couldn’t remember how long it would take them to cover the distances, but they did get a lot walking done in one afternoon.
  The climb was long and confusing. The darkness surrounding her was so overbearing that it felt like she wasn’t going anywhere at all. She focused on the few meters her floodlight could illuminate and kept telling herself that she just had to reach the next section, and then the next section, and the next after that.
  After two hours she could hear her suit warn her about oxygen and she carefully steadied herself to switch tank. In complete silence she dropped the empty tank into the darkness below her. It was chilling seeing it disappear, like it didn’t exist any more. She didn’t want to acknowledge it, but in the same way she didn’t feel sad about leaving her colleagues down there. In a strange way, just like the oxygen tank, they didn’t exist to her any more. It was not a conscious dismissal, it was just the way she felt.
  Coetzee continued and soon after the tank switch she started to notice the tiny shift in the light around her – it was getting brighter. She almost choked from tears of happiness as she crossed into the twilight zone. Seeing natural light, even as sparse as this, was incredible and she felt herself going quicker and quicker, rushing towards the top.
  That’s when she slipped. She fell and grabbed on to a metal railing meant for maintenance robots. It was weak and slim - it wouldn’t carry her for long. With mounting panic she fumbled with her tool belt, got a key for the oxygen tank, and opened one of the spares on full. The tank rocketed away, pulling Coetzee with it. The tank carried her up, but she was getting away from the barrel. It took careful aim and a good portion of luck; she managed to steer back over the barrel and let go of the tank. She slammed into the barrel and held on for dear life.
  She stayed there, recovering, for the longest time. She knew she was losing oxygen, but she had to calm herself down in order to go on. When her heart had stopped racing, she stood up and carried on with the climb.

  After another two hours she switched tanks again. This time she could clearly see the top of the mid-atlantic ridge. She was getting there, but she didn’t want to risk falling again, so she kept her eyes fixed a few meters ahead and concentrated.
  At length she realized she could see structures ahead. It was the bottom of the submersed stabilizing parts of the Omega platform. She didn’t know the layout of Omega, but wagered a guess that she was about fifty meters from the surface. She kept moving, concentrating on the steps ahead.
  The suit felt heavy as she finally pushed through the surface. The light was blinding for a moment until her eyes could get used to what she was seeing. It was a beautiful day. The blue ocean stretched as far as the eye could see. The burning hot orange sun was covered by what looked like smog or smeared clouds high above. As particles of dirt started to settle on her visor it quickly became apparent that the atmosphere was full of dust and ashes. She checked her suit’s climate scanner:
  The air was toxic – better not take the helmet off.
  Coetzee climbed the last meters up to where the barrel met the platform. She jumped down on to an observation deck and started looking for a way inside. She cleared the dust from her visor with her hand and was able to locate the door leading inside. It was like a small oil rig, fitted with work rooms, a weather station, a couple of offices and a small habitat with beds and a kitchen.
  She smiled and with childish glee she thought I could live here. I could be happy here.
  She walked around the habitat and looked through the books and other things that someone had left here. She put her hand on the couch to feel the spring in the cushion. She wanted so badly to sit down and read and drink tea. There must be some in the kitchen, she thought, but first there was something else that she needed to do. As she stood up in the middle of the common room she took a deep breath and unlocked her helmet. She put the helmet to the side and started to step out of the armored suit.
  It was warm, too warm, but she didn’t care. Feeling any kind of natural air on her skin was heavenly.
  Coetzee started looking through the drawers and the wardrobes in the bedrooms. She couldn’t find anything in her size, but oversized male shirts and jeans were enough to make her feel human again. Step by step, she was shedding the horrors of the abyss. She felt like herself for the first time in years.
  Coetzee coughed, and then coughed again. She knew what was happening, but she wouldn’t let that ruin this moment for her.
  The kitchen did have tea and some pasta, rice, and other dried foods. It wasn’t gourmet food, but for someone like Coetzee who had been eating basically anything that the body could digest for months, this was a feast.
  Coetzee cooked it all and ate as much as she could stomach. She had a hard time keeping it all down, but her overeating just made her laugh. She was incredibly happy.
  Her coughing got worse. Blood stained her new shirt. Without worrying, she hurried to replace it. Time was short, she thought, and went out on the observation deck again. It was even warmer than before, but the natural sunlight and the fresh ocean wind made her want to stay out there.
  Coetzee pulled a chair from the common room out on to the deck. Grabbed a pile of books and sat them down next to the chair. She brought out a glass and a bottle of whisky she found in the pantry.
  Coetzee sat down in the chair. Picked up a book of poems by Keats and flipped through it. She didn’t do much reading, she was so wrapped up in the feeling of being on the surface again.
  She coughed. The blood stained the book of poems. She uncorked the whisky bottle and threw the cork into the sea.
  As the sun set that day over the Omega platform Coetzee was falling asleep for the last time in her life. She could feel it, she knew what was happening, but damn it was worth it.

the_coin_flip.txt

   +---------------+
   | The Coin Flip |
   +---------------+

  Peter Strasky felt nervous but excited as he entered Catherine’s scan room. It was a remote control station that had been refurbished into a brain scanner. Catherine was using it to save digital copies of the people at Theta and put them into a digital realm dubbed the ARK. The idea of saving your mind digitally had been discussed at great lengths during the last few weeks. To many it simply seemed unnecessary. Why would you need a digital copy of yourself? It wouldn’t physically be saving you in any way. It was nothing more than a fancy photograph. The usual counterargument was simply: why not? It was such a small sacrifice to sit down in a Pilot Seat and let Catherine flood your brain with electromagnetism for a few seconds. If anything the copy of the brain would be incredibly happy and could possibly live on for an eternity. It would be like sending off your twin to live in a paradise.
  The ARK project drew so much attention that surveys were circulated to determine how the staff actually felt about it and how the project should be shaped if it was to be completed. People got increasingly invested in Catherine’s pet project, and before she knew it, it was decided that this would be Theta’s last official effort. If the human race was about to go extinct, as it decidedly seemed to be doing, then the last people left alive would leave a token to be remembered by. This digital realm, the ARK, would be a perfect way to preserve the qualities of being human.
  As Strasky entered, Catherine was at the computer looking at a cluttered screen full of graphs and numbers.
  “Hi,” he said.
  Catherine’s chair swiveled around to face Strasky. He instantly smiled, not just because they were friends, but because Catherine always seemed to look slightly baffled with her eyebrows raised while she was in deep into her work. It was one of Strasky’s favorite things about Catherine and it made him laugh almost every time.
  “Strasky, how are you?” said Catherine, and smiled.
  “Nervous about the scan. How’s the project going?”
  “It’s going well. The world is improving with every scan I add. Easier to tweak when there are product testers that can tell me what’s wrong.”
  “Can you talk to the people inside the ARK?”
  “I try not to… not directly. It’s more like observing, reading data. I’m not spying on them or anything. Just the stats. Do you want to get going with the scan?”
  “Not really.” He laughed nervously. “But I guess I have to.”
  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
  “And sit out the greatest show on earth… and beyond? I heard we’re launching it into space.”
  “Yeah, I don’t like the idea of just leaving it down here. It’s a piece of technology after all. The WAU could get to it too easily.”
  “Really, you’re blaming WAU? I thought you said that was like blaming evolution for killer sharks.”
  “You know what I mean. It’s just a short-hand way to refer to all the madness that the WAU spawned.”
  “You have to be careful about that. I’ve heard people talking about the WAU like it was a god or something. That it is actually controlling robots and machines to get to us. To kill us all. It’s hard to know what people actually mean when some people take it literally and some think of it like a shorthand.”
  “Sorry, I’ll be careful in the future. Do you want to have a seat?”
  “I was actually hoping on stalling some more…”
  “Strask, there’s no need to worry. It doesn’t hurt.”
  “It’s not that. It’s what comes after.”
  Catherine’s smile dropped. She knew what he was referring to, but didn’t know how to properly handle it.
  “It’ll be fine,” she said, quietly, “Just don’t get your hopes up.”
  Strasky walked over to the mechanized seat and sat down. He had never had the opportunity to use one of the Pilot Seats before. They were usually handled by construct wranglers and field service technicians to remotely control complex machinery and robots. It was a firm seat, but still comfortable. Certainly made to accommodate countless of hours of work.
  “Put your head back, please. All the way back to the cushion.”
  The seat started powering up, leaning back ever so slightly to put the pilot in the perfect position. The helmet came down and blacked out Strasky’s vision.
  “Catherine? What’s… is it supposed to sound like that?”
  “Everything’s fine. You’ll see some flashing lights.”
  The blackness bursted into a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes. A high-pitched buzz drowned out the soundscape. Strasky didn’t feel any pain, only a quickly receding fear. Getting past the initial fright he felt the rush of a rollercoaster ride. Just as it started to race, it stopped. The sound quickly winding down, the screen clearing up in front of him.
  Strasky chuckled as the helmet came off. Then the rush of excitement faded and he started to realize what had happened. He sat up in the seat and looked over at Catherine by her computer.
  “It didn’t… I am here.”
  “I’m sorry, Strask.”
  He didn’t get the grand prize. He tried to stop tears pooling in his eyes by quickly wiping at them with his sleeves. “I lost the coin toss,” he said, quietly.
  “Nothing’s changed. You’re still here. How’s your head? I got painkillers, antacids, and other stuff.”
  Strasky did feel queasy, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. Besides, he was too occupied with the thought of still being here. “Thank you, but no. I’m good, I guess. So we’re done, right?” He tried his best to push away his feelings.
  “Yes, your scan is completed. But you can stay if you want. Just doing one scan per day anyway.”
  “No, I should get back to work.”
  As he stood up he almost fell to the floor, and found he was crying. “Goddamn it, it’s… I really wanted to go. Can’t believe I have to stay here and die with the rest of the losers. It’s so unfair. This was the way out. We were supposed to be saved. Jesus Christ.”
  Catherine looked sad, shellshocked. She probably had no idea how to deal with people like this.
  He wiped his eyes. “You don’t happen to have enough pills to kill me, right?”
  “No, just to make you really sick.” she answered, disapproval in her eyes. She turned to her computer and got back to work.
  Strasky collected himself, wiped his eyes clean again, pulled his hand through his hair, and took a few deep breaths. He looked to Catherine, but there was nothing to be found there. She had turned cold, distant.
  “Well, thank you, I guess,” he said and opened the door.
  Just as he was about to leave, Catherine said: “Don’t do it, okay?”
  Strasky exhaled and smiled back at Catherine: “Don’t worry. You guys aren’t getting rid of me that easily.”

§

  Before his site was evacuated Baxter Rogers used to work with the Upsilon thermal plant. What he liked about it was that it was a difficult job. It blended his engineering expertise with a good amount of gut feeling. The plant producing electrical power for all of Pathos-II was huge, fueled by geothermal heat emanating from molten rock beneath earth’s crust. It wasn’t complete madness, there were calculations and measurements, but in many ways it was like placing a power plant on top of an active volcano. Rogers was the human eye that kept the computerized systems in check. He lived for the responsibility of deciding how to channel heat through the partially natural, partially artificial flues that reached into earth’s core.
  There were two recent incidents that had affected Rogers’ current mood: site service engineer Heather Wolchezk had handed over his plant responsibilities to the station-wide artificial intelligence, WAU, which practically relegated him to pure maintenance assignments. And then there was the Upsilon evacuation. He could understand the reasoning – there was no real point in keeping all of Upsilon active. After the comet took out the surface there wasn’t much use in keeping the gas harvesters or the manufacturing lines running. All of that only made sense when Pathos-II was still an active satellite launcher.
  When Rogers arrived at Theta he realized he wasn’t as much out of a job as he was a refugee. There was nothing to do except to hang around the site. His new supervisors gave him as many assignments as they could, but the truth was that Theta was a well-oiled machine. The people from Upsilon were mostly in the way and it only got worse as they evacuated Delta.
  Rogers could feel himself becoming worse as a person. He was bitter and jealous of the people who still had a sense of purpose. He tried to stay strong, to remain focused on being helpful and kind, but it wasn’t always so easy.
  Rogers entered Catherine’s scan room without as much as a knock. Unfazed, Catherine stared at her computer screen. Rogers took a deep breath, trying to keep centered. He didn’t care much for Catherine. She was weak; he had always felt strongly that she should have been locked inside a room while the real people deal with the complex aftermath of this dying world.
  But no matter how much he disliked her, she had somehow been able to give everyone a second chance, an eternal life inside a digital paradise. Get a scan and you would have a chance of waking up in a world without troubles, so they said.
  “Hey, I’m here for the scan,” he said.
  Catherine looked at her calendar and checked his name. “Okay,” she said with a forced smile.
  “Yeah, so I just sit in the Pilot Seat?”
  “Yes.”
  Rogers sat down, trying to get comfortable.
  “You have to lean all the way…”
  “Yeah, trust me, I know,” he said. “I’ve used a Pilot Seat before. You just make sure this doesn’t blow up or anything.”
  “Blow up?”
  “Heard you’re cranking it up so much it makes the blackbox vibrate – making people sick, giving them headaches, shit like that.”
  “I got some medicine, for after…”
  “Medicine? I think a mop would be better.”
  Catherine went silent and pressed a button. The helmet came down, closing Roger’s vision.
  “Do I need to do anything or is all this remote?”
  “It’s automated.”
  “All right, let’s roll.”
  “I… I just have to… You are Baxter Rogers, right?”
  “Yeah, but no-one fucking calls me Baxter so you better not start.”
  “You are from Delta?”
  “Are you for real, isn’t this shit already in the computer? I’m from Upsilon.”
  “Sorry. Found you.”
  Catherine started the process. Rogers braced himself as the electromagnetism shot through his skull. It was making him sick, but he was set on not letting it get to him. Rogers fought the experience, snorting through his clenched jaw.
  Finally the machine wound down and the helmet came off. Rogers sat up, retching. He managed to hold back the vomit and ended up spitting over his clothes. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve as he cursed. That’s when it hit him: he was still here.
  “Short straw, huh?” he said, slowly shaking his head.
  Catherine avoided his gaze, trying to look busy with the computer.
  “It’s not the fucking ARK is it?”
  Catherine held her breath.
  “Is it?!” he yelled.
  “No, it’s not.”
  “Pretty fucked up, isn’t it? You’re pretty fucked up. You get people excited about your salvation. Let’s all live happily ever after in a paradise – it’s such a fucking lie.”
  Rogers stood up, lumbered over to Catherine’s desk and grabbed her tea cup. He gargled a sip of her tea and spat it back. He looked at the model on her computer screen and nodded.
  “Is that me?”
  “Yes.”
  “I can’t believe people are killing themselves over this shit. You know who should kill themselves? You. I mean you believe in this don’t you?”
  “I… never said…”
  “What, you’re too scared to follow your own bullshit? You just enjoy seeing other people die, that’s it, isn’t it?”
  Catherine’s eyes welled up – she looked petrified. Rogers finally realized that he was being an asshole, as ever. It kept happening, especially when faced with a punching-bag like Dr. Catherine Chun. He stopped himself, searched for a way out. He should have apologized, but his frail sense of self wouldn’t allow it.
  He put down the spoiled cup of tea back on the desk and cleared his throat.
  “Good luck with your project.”
  He left and never spoke to Catherine again.

§

  Robin Bass had been intrigued when the ARK project was first brought up as a serious undertaking. It sounded almost too good to be true. Could they really load their own minds into a computer and survive the hell that earth had been turned into? The answer to that question was a lot more complex than Bass had anticipated, but the fact was that Catherine Chun simply offered the staff to save a copy of their brain and let it live on inside a digital world that would be loaded on a space-probe framework and shot into space. If anything, it was a spectacular final message from the human race before it succumbed to its dying environment. Like the famous golden record aboard the Voyager in 1977, this would remain as a final statement, a reminder that humanity was once here.
  What Catherine didn’t foresee was that people would find so many different meanings to attach to the project. They would see it as a second life that they might join after their physical death; or that it was their metaphorical twin and that they would in some way survive in a way beyond just being information inside a complex simulation.
  The most influential idea was that of Continuity. It started in the philosophical musings of Mark Sarang. He suggested that the copy was perfect and couldn’t be separated from the self. The self that was copied would simply believe: nothing has changed, I got transported here. There would be nothing new about this copy; it wasn’t something that started or activated, it was effortlessly continuing in the same way as normal; you kept moving from moment to moment. The only thing that would make you different from the copy would be your paths diverging. When you’d spent too much time apart, you would end up as two different individuals. But for that one brief instant of copying, the you that was copied and the you that you are would be the same, not similar, but the exact same.
  The controversial idea that Sarang proposed was that if you removed the physical original, your self would only have one path to go down, the one inside the digital paradise.
  Simply stated: if you died shortly after the scan, your subjective self would wake up inside the digital world.
  The idea was crazy. There were so many metaphysical questions that would have to be answered before coming to this conclusion. Yet it was very similar to the idea of teleportation. If you bought into the idea that breaking down your body and assembling a perfect copy somewhere else would result in a perfect transfer of the self, then the road to Sarang’s Continuity-idea was remarkably short.
  The catalyst in this scenario wasn’t just Sarang’s argument, but that people wanted to believe in it, desperately so. And when Sarang successfully killed himself after getting his scan done there were suddenly a lot of skeptics coming around.
  When Robin Bass finally entered Catherine’s scan room she had seen a handful of people follow Sarang, believing that they too would bypass the 50-50 chance of waking up in the digital world. Robin hoped she wouldn’t have to consider it, she hoped that she would wake up inside the ARK and leave her old physical body behind.
  Catherine turned to greet her, but it ended up as an awkward wave.
  “Dr. Chun. Thank you for seeing me.”
  “Thank you for coming,” said Catherine with a careful smile. “Have you used the Pilot Seat before?”
  “Every now and then. Been a while now though.”
  Bass got into the seat and took a deep breath.
  “You have to lean back.”
  “Just give me a minute.”
  “It doesn’t hurt,” said Catherine, smile reassuring.
  “I heard. It’s the coin toss I’m nervous about. I really want to end up on the other side, you know?” Bass’ voice was cracking up, almost in tears.
  They sat in silence for a moment, Bass breathing carefully.
  “I wish people wouldn’t think of it like that,” said Catherine.
  “Can’t blame us for hoping.”
  Catherine sighed, exhausted by what she knew would happen.
  “Okay, let’s do this,” said Bass and leaned back in the seat.
  Catherine started the process and the helmet came down. Bass’ tried to control her breathing to minimize the nauseating effects she had heard about. As the machine wound Bass found herself whispering out loud: please, please, please…
  Catherine turned her head towards the computer screen to avoid facing Bass as the helmet lifted from her vision.
  “No.” Bass buried her face in her hands. There was no holding it back, Bass was devastated. She sat there for what seemed like a lifetime just crying her eyes out.
  When she finally looked up, Catherine was curled up into a ball in her chair, trembling.
  “I’m sorry,” said Bass as she got up from the seat. “Can’t be easy seeing all your colleagues break down.”
  Catherine exhaled as a tear fell down her cheek. “They all lose. Before Sarang everyone was happy, laughing it off. There was no way to get inside the ARK. Now everyone is hoping they will be the one to continue into the paradise. Now all I see is disappointment.”
  “That’s awful. How can you stand it?”
  Catherine paused, struggling with an answer. “Because it’s important.”
  Bass walked over to Catherine and hugged her. Catherine resisted at first, but then gradually Bass felt the tension leave her. “You are important, Catherine. You are.”
  Bass let go of Catherine, hoping she had done more good than bad for this frightened child that was trying so hard to save mankind. “Never give up, Dr. Chun.”
  And with those final words Bass left the scan room and headed back to her quarters, where she put a razor to her wrist.