The Last Supper

The entrée was a simple salad of rocket and dandelion leaves, tossed with a light dressing of raspberry vinegar and extra virgin olive oil, topped with slivers of parmesan and fresh truffle shavings. He raised a forkful to his mouth and savoured the subtle combination of flavours.

He was eating alone. The Institute had offered to serve the meal for any guests he wanted to have as well, but there was no one he felt close enough to that he would have elected to share this moment with him. He was a loner, but that was nothing unusual for those who had come this far in the selection process. He ate the salad quickly, concentrating on the taste and texture of the food, trying to put the rest of his world aside.

As soon as the salad was finished, the silent waiter quickly whisked the empty plate away. While he waited for the next course, he drank from the glass of good Riesling, which had been his choice to begin the meal. Without the distraction of the food, his thoughts moved to his situation; the irrevocability of the step he would take on the morrow.

For human space exploration, the transformation offered only advantages. The more mass had to be accelerated to near-light speeds, the greater the amount of energy needed. Providing enough food for a human to consume over months and years was a major problem; and the efficiency of the human body in winning energy from food was laughable anyway – particularly when there was an alternative.

The next course came; fettuccini with small slices of freshly grilled wild salmon, covered with a lemon-cream sauce, lightly set off with dill. He chewed and swallowed, reflecting on the fact that this evening was the last time he would chew. From tomorrow onwards, chewing would become superfluous.

He would still drink, of course – his body would still need the same amount of water, even some more than in his present physiological state – but water was easily recycled, even in a small ship hurtling through the immense distances between the stars. But the biological process of producing energy through the basic chemical reaction between oxygen and sugar – burning carbohydrates – would no longer be necessary.

Tomorrow morning they would sedate him, insert a central venous catheter, and pour the nannites into his body. They would begin their busy work all through his organism on the cellular level and four weeks later he would awaken from his artificial cocoon state, the transformation complete.

The main course arrived; slices of roast duck, previously marinated in red wine, with ginger and garlic, couscous dumplings, and quickly stir-fried peppers, onions, courgettes and thinly-sliced water chestnuts. There was a gravy of the roasting duck juices, enhanced with the marinating theme of wine, ginger and garlic. The wine was a rich Haut-Brion Bordeaux.

As he savoured the duck and the wine, he thought of the changes which would take place in his body. He would grow much thinner and lighter, his skin taking on a green colour as it produced the specially designed chlorophyll-analogue which his system could now use to gain energy directly from light, any source of light. Some of his internal organs, like all those metres of intestines would practically disappear, others, above all the liver, modify themselves to take on adapted functions. How much more efficient, how wonderfully elegant, he thought. All he needed apart from light was water and minerals and trace elements (only a couple of grams daily), which could be dissolved in the water. The transformation would make it vastly easier for him to spend long periods in space and give him almost complete autonomy in his exploration of new planets. It would increase his life expectancy and the new, largely plant-based cellular structure of his body would be much more robust; better able to withstand long periods of high acceleration, radiation and hostile environments,

He was eating more slowly now, relishing the excellently cooked meal. His last meal. It was the sacrifice of feeding which had gripped the public imagination most about transformation and the reason why this ritual of the final meal, The Last Supper, had been initiated. Indeed, although it had never for a moment rocked his determination to take this step, the renunciation had seemed great. He had consoled himself with the thought that it was somehow fitting; that such major advantages, such fundamental metamorphoses, must, in some fashion, be appropriately paid for. Until his conversation this afternoon with Helga, his mentor. He watched her green eyes (gleaming in an even greener face) incredulously as she explained.

“… some kind of side-effect. We still don’t really understand how it works; despite all the progress we’ve made, there are still many functions of the brain we only imperfectly understand. At any rate, after transformation, you will discover that you won’t only obtain your energy from light, you will also … taste it.

“We keep this information confidential until immediately before transformation. We don’t want it to have an influence on our applicants or their screening process. But you have to be told before it happens – otherwise you will be very confused when you awake after transformation has been completed. It is a phenomenon which takes some getting used to.”

The waiter removed the remains of his dessert – a creation of mousses of various varieties of chocolate – and brought coffee and Armagnac. Replete, he sipped the liquor. A smile played over his face.

To taste light, in all its wavelengths, all its combinations! An unexpected galaxy of gourmet pleasure opened itself before him, he who had been prepared to become an ultimate ascetic for the sake of knowledge and adventure.

The chocolate taste of Aldebaran.

The frothy roast chicken savour of the Orion Nebula.

The sweet lemon succulence of Sirius.

All the myriad flavours of the universe …

Opting Out

originally posted at Obnoxi.us, 14.11.2011

I really don’t think there’s much point in writing this, but it seems somehow wrong to disappear from life – such as it is – without leaving some kind of message. Message to whom? Hah! Nobody in this fucked-up world that I can think off anyway; those who would care have taken the same way as I plan to. Maybe I’ll meet some of them again. It’s one of my major hopes.

A message then to a person or persons unknown. Maybe archaeologists from some unimaginable future … in the unlikely event that humanity manages to survive the mess it seems to have screwed itself into. Or alien explorers, landing on a planet showing signs of an extinct civilisation. Or even humans from an alternate reality; the plethora of virtual alternatives we have been creating makes everything possible, in digital imagination anyway – for all that that’s worth.

So then, I suppose I should try to explain what this is all about. I have finally given up on RL, as they call it, real life and have opted instead to join the growing horde of those escaping to VL, virtual life.

It’s a one-way ticket, you see, for all intents and purposes. Oh yes, if you’ve got enough money you can buy the special withdraw-after-thirty-days option, but it you take it, it involves rather nasty withdrawal symptoms and extensive neurological reconstruction surgery. Even among those who buy it, only about one in ten thousand actually makes use of it – and many of them ultimately return to RL if they have the money or suicide it they don’t. That kind of news spreads so most people don’t bother with the opt-out – it’s a better bet to invest every cent you can in your VL package.

The biggest recruiter for VL is RL anyway. What with the low level radioactive poisoning from the brief but murderous Middle East Holocaust a few years ago, the increasing spate of natural disasters from a wheeling climate which can’t seem to decide between global warming and nuclear winter, the lawless chaos in many areas of the major cities worldwide, the ongoing recession because of declining growth, the press of illegal immigrants from the poor into the rich world, etc., etc. … do I really need to go on? A growing number of those who can afford it are opting out into VL every year; many of them the people RL would need to put things back together again, or at least keep them on an even keel. Most have lost any hope that the transnational corporations and financial institutions, who have the real control over the world, have the slightest clue as to what they are doing, apart from using complex questionable algorithms to continually maximise short-term profits. And the crux of the whole thing is that a continually growing amount of the capital they are working with comes from funds set up to finance the VLers who have abandoned RL and are only interested in obtaining the best possible returns to pay for their adventures in dream worlds.

You see, you get what you pay for and the VL packages aren’t cheap. Your unconscious dreaming body has to be cared for – on a basic level, with lots of automation to be sure – but it still needs to be kept alive. There are no guarantees, of course, and there’s no money back if you die but Microgoogle™ claim that 78% of all 65 year olds who enter one of their worlds are still alive at the end of their contract. Amazapple™ has a much better figure (93%) but their packages are much more expensive.

When you have decided to go for VL, you have to make some basic decisions, the most fundamental one being what you can afford. The corporations offer all sorts of packages and you really need to compare them and read the small print – in fact, a whole new service area has grown up to advise clients about the best package for their particular desires and means. The choices are complex and not always clear, so that most people feel that the fee they take for this service is well invested. They’ll also help you to liquidate all your assets, taking care of the paperwork needed to negotiate with pension funds and life-insurance companies about lump-sum payments or models for regular payments, etc.

In my case, Virtual Bliss Consultants™ recommended a short-list of four packages. It didn’t take me long to exclude the Amazapple™ deal included; it would have given me a very high-quality experience and first-class care for my body, but the price meant that I would only have two and a half years in Virtuality before my contract was ended, I was disconnected and my unconscious body let die. The Microgoogle™ package I have chosen gives me nearly nine years, partly because they’ll also pay me for a kidney and my eyes (one kidney is plenty for a resting body and I won’t need my eyes any more – there’s the added advantage that their removal makes an easy brain-hardware interface over the optic nerve possible).

My package also has some other interesting features. I get a guaranteed eight years, 334 days but, depending on the performance of the investment of my payment, it can be extended. There’s no way, of course, that I’ll be able to find out about this when I’ve moved to VL but that means that I won’t know the moment of my death there; when the money runs out I’ll simply wink out of existence – no warning, no pain.

Though, of course, it may happen before that; if my adventures in VL bring me into a situation in which I’m killed then that’s it. It’s a feature which “enhances the verisimilitude” of the experience, as Microgoogle™ puts it. Apparently, a guarantee of practical invulnerable immortality (even if limited for the minimum contract period) introduces such a high chaos factor that the algorithms controlling the VL world you have chosen have problems dealing with it. Amazapple™ have just offered a new package with a (limited) invulnerability option but the price means that you have to be very rich to even consider taking it.

There’s also a teaser. My package contains connections between the world I have chosen and many others. There’s no guarantee you will find them and less as to where they will lead you but Microgoogle™ is playing up this feature in their advertising with phrases such as “endless adventure in exciting quests for new worlds.”

I know it’s a tiny chance, but it opens the possibility that I might even find my son there. It’s been five years since he went virtual, after his wife and daughter had been killed in the terrorist thermonuclear incident in Paris. The life-insurance payment for his wife, plus his considerable assets, meant he was able to buy a twenty five year contract. So, as far as I know, he’s still in there somewhere.

As far as I know … The gulf between RL and VL is absolute. When the enabling legislation was being hammered out between lawyers, lobbyists and lawmakers in the US Congress and the European Parliament, this was an aspect on which both sides agreed very quickly. The idea of regular contact between VL and Real Life was anathema to both sides; an avalanche of complaints and people changing their minds, the constant destabilisation of the “real” world through news from thousands of virtual ones, lawsuits and questions of liability, pressure for RL regulation of all sorts of specific issues in the myriad RL worlds. So the decision for VL is an irrevocable one (apart from the optional thirty-day-withdrawal clause I mentioned earlier, something pushed through by the consumer-rights lobby during the legal negotiations) – a one way ticket to … wherever you want and whatever you can afford basically.

So next Tuesday I will be entering Microgoogle™’s GrandeurWorld® (3.2.01763). It’s a comfortable, fairly secure one, designed around 18^th Century motives, and my role is that of a modestly wealthy, handsome young dandy with pre-programmed expertise with the rapier. Two thousand other participants will also enter with me (Amazapple™ make a play for exclusivity by trumpeting the fact that the maximum number of participants in their worlds is three hundred, but my counsellor at Virtual Bliss assures me that GrandeurWorld is big and complex enough to easily accommodate us all and that a larger number of participants can actually make the experience richer and more interesting). While I feel a little nervous, I have no regrets about leaving Real Life – as I mentioned at the beginning of this, I regard it as being irrevocably fucked-up anyway. The only worry I really have is that things here will go downhill so quickly that the whole infrastructure supporting the VLers (often called the “undead” in popular culture) will collapse, but both Microgoogle™ and Amazapple™ claim that they are prepared for every foreseeable eventuality for at least the next fifteen years (including a state-guaranteed option for them to employ private armies if they judge this necessary).

The only certain thing is death anyway, and I’d rather have mine somewhere else. I must finish this now, it’s time for me to catch my flight to British Colombia, where MicroGoogle™ have the facility where my body will be stored – along with around eight million others. They have ten others worldwide and Amazapple™ has its own as well. Cynics call it the Necropolis. What do I care? This world is dying anyway.