THE STAR-STEADERS (Part 1): Cause for Celebration
For the series overview - please see the introductory post here.
July 11th, 2058 CE
Ted Demmings @ Spring Rose Estate, Lake Tahoe, Earth
An evening glow painted the hills and pines a bright ochre as the hazy sun tucked itself away behind the ridgelines of the northern Sierras. The scent of alpine wilderness and wood smoke mixed with a variety of savory fumes coming from the nearby hor’deurves table.
Ted Demmings sipped at his Irish Whiskey and surveyed the landscape before him. It had been a busy month and he was grateful to finally be able to relax. Sitting alone on the outskirts of the mansion’s veranda, Ted had unplugged from his Cyg and was perceiving the world with merely his own two eyes.
From across the porch, a gaggle of children came romping over, laughing and chasing a little boy in the lead. The boy came up right next to Ted and tried to use the chair as a sort of blockade from the other children. Snapping into attention, Ted had to say something.
“Easy there bud, you’re a little too young to be getting chased by the mob.” Ted then turned and faced the other children.
“And just what is this all about? Logan right?” Ted asked the eight year old who was leading the chase.
“We’re just playing trolls and suits, we gotta catch him to win.” Logan’s face looked innocent but was intent. The other boys and girls behind him all nodded. Some were spreading out in a circle around Ted’s chair. The boy being chased was starting to shift his feet around, bouncing in the way only a child can.
“Well just be careful not to run into one of the fi…” he got caught off from a clamoring sound as the kid being chased jumped up onto the cement fire-ring and then leapt over top the flames. There was only a momentary gasp of surprise, and soon Logan was running off towards a crowd of mingling adults.
The other children were quickly in pursuit. Ted didn’t bother to reiterate his warning about the fires. He wasn’t about to chide somebody else’s kids. If somebody got hurt, they’d learn a lesson far better than from experience than instruction.
Ted sat for a few minutes more, contemplating his successes, but also weighing his concerns. He’d had a long month, and an even longer year. Tonight was his chance to relax, to be given praise for all his efforts, but he was having problems doing so.
There wasn’t much more that could be done at this stage anyway, his life’s work was already underway. Somewhere in the sky above, his first sailcraft was at cruising speed. It already was travelling faster than 4% the speed of light, driven by multiple laser arrays spread throughout the solar system.
Voices from a few hundred people inside the great hall and outside on the veranda mixed together into a buzz of life and celebration. Interspersed among the crowd, waiter-bots served drinks and camera drones were documenting every detail.
This was a historic moment. Tonight was about praising the accomplishments of thousands of people, and Ted was one of the most honored among them. Yet, Ted couldn’t quite shake the anxiety he felt. Everything had gone smoothly, but it had gone too smoothly.
Quickly he booted into his Cygnia unit, or Cyg, and his vision suddenly overlaid with an artificial interface. In the upper right quadrant of his vision, an animated holographic shape whirled around and vibrated slightly as it ‘spoke’ to him in a soft woman’s voice.
[ Good evening darling. I do hope you’ve had a chance to relax, I’ve missed you. ]
Ted smirked at this.
The voice was that of his ‘Prime,’ which means the primary agent for his Cyg unit. Some people chose mirror images of themselves, others chose celebrities or fictional characters, but Ted’s prime had effectively become his life partner. She was modeled after no one person in particular, she was instead a combination of various personality attributes that he found to be enjoyable company.
“I missed you too, Sal,” Ted messaged her without speaking aloud. “I’ve relaxed for a bit, but I can’t keep my mind from wandering. There’s so much at stake.”
With this remark, Sal transformed from a HUD element into an embodied cybernetic hologram, or cygram. She appeared as a woman with straight blond hair and an immaculately clean white suit. Her artifice was sitting on the empty chair next to Ted.
[ There’s nothing to worry about Teddy. You’ve done your job and you’ve done it well. Anything you missed would have been caught by the draft engineers, simulator Cogs, even the Supers. ]
The term Cog meant a Cognitive Machine, a catch-all phrase for an artificial mind which included artificial intelligence, brain simulation, or brain upload, any sentient being that operated outside of pure biology.
“Yeah, I know Sal, but I gut shake this feeling in my gut. Something isn’t quite right.”
[ Ted, you’re a walking sack of hormones and microbes designed to forage berries and avoid being hunted by predators. Your gut is upset because you’ve been stressed out for years trying to accomplish your life’s work. You’ll never be done, you’ll never be 100% perfect, but everything is okay--you just need to relax.]
Ted smiled and sipped at his drink. “That’s easy for you to say, you’ve never had to deal with having biological parts.”
[ No, but I have to put up with your biological parts all the time. ] She said with a sly grin, she was referring to the conjugal relationship he had with her robotic body, back home in Vallejo. Ted smiled back.
[ Besides, human derived Cogs like me have existential issues to deal with too. We’re just better at tuning out the cosmic dread. ]
Ted mused over this, finished his drink, and motioned to the pack of children still running around on the other side of the veranda.
“What are your thoughts on kids?” He asked his virtual spouse.
[ You have been drinking tonight, haven’t you? ] She said stifling a laugh. Then she paused while they stared at each other in an almost awkward silence. [ Do you mean in general, or are you propositioning to have one? ]
“Well, both. Your childhood is more hypothetical than real, but it doesn’t have to be that way for the kid if we wanted to have one.”
Sal had been constructed from various real and simulated personas, each with their own subjective experiences. To build a new individual mind was not a complicated task, but it still required responsibilities, licensing, and a statement of intent.
[ I think you’ve already got a baby. She’s named the the SSF Theodorus, and she’s leaving home for the first time. 100 AU is a long way away, and 28 light years is a lot further. That’s why you don’t feel so good right now, it’s out of your hands now.]
Ted thought about this. Sal was probably right, she almost always was, which was one of the biggest downsides to being in love with a ‘Cog.’ It was a sort of bizarre arrangement if you thought about it for too long. Ted had been married once, a relationship that was eerily similar, except that Sal actually could read his mind.
Sal had been spawned about eight years ago, just a few months after Ted had upgraded his Cygnia unit to the brain integrated model called the Nexius. The earlier Cygnia ‘neural lace’ units weren’t sophisticated enough to tap into all the senses.
Every Cyg by default has a registered Prime, a head intelligent agent to perform the task of managing all the other intelligent agents. Effectively the Prime acts as a gatekeeper between the individual mind and Synaptic Network, the Synet. She deals with all hundreds of millions of incoming synet packages and parses out the ones directed to him which hold enough merit to be worth bringing up.
Primes also maintain actual occupancy of many of the mirror neurons in the host’s mind. Effectively, Sal is something between an imaginary friend, a closely knit spouse, a secretary, and a network router. She does however, also have limited autonomy and individual agency. Meaning, that by the definition of the law, she has equal rights just like any other sentient being. If she chose to separate from Ted, she would be provided with enough cloudspace to leave and become wholly digital.
The separation agreement was standard for all Cyg users, although only about one in twenty takes their prime as a literal spouse. Ted’s additionally has a duplicate, a backup model of his brain, that exists in a deep-storage state only. If something were to happen to “root”-Ted, his live-backup would be switched from passive to active mode, and he would continue life virtually.
Of course Ted still had Cog “clones” operating in various places, about two dozen active “Forks” and “Branches,” terms borrowed from programming versioning software. Some previous Forks had even voluntarily given up autonomy in order to merge memories and rejoin Ted Prime. The boundaries of the individual was very flexible in the era of the Synet and each active Fork added additional tax penalties on most major blockchain financial systems.
It was these very Forks that Ted wanted to sync with now. He had several that he wanted an update from on the status of the Theodorus. He didn’t need to say anything, Sal instinctively just knew.
[ Don’t worry about a thing Teddy doll, I’m on it. I’ve been receiving regular updates from Lunar 1 & 2, Solar-L3 and L4, Mercury, Deimos, Vesta and Ceres. Everything has been running smoothly, but we’ll ping again just to be sure. Theo is receiving 1.03 g forces, and there’s been no major interruptions in any of the arrays. ]
“I’m mostly worried about the belt lasers. If anything goes wrong, we won’t know about it for almost half an hour.”
[ Look, we built redundancy for exactly that reason. If Ceres cuts out, Vesta will pick up the slack. Theodorus will have a stable velocity, she’s going to do just fine. ]
One of the waiter-bots delicately strode up and handed Ted another Irish Whisky. He hadn’t ordered it, but Sal motioned with her hand that it was for him.
[ Drink up hun, you’re not allowed to be worried tonight. You work too much and I have to watch you do it. Tomorrow I’m going to make you take us on a hike. A real one! ]
“In this heat? With the hangover you’re trying to give me?”
[ That’s not all, you’re going to talk to other people tonight too! Not just your engineers either, and you’re going to keep my avatar on public mode. I don’t get to spend enough time talking to real humans in a real environment. Plus, this estate is absolutely stunning. ]
Ted panned his vision around again, the mountains across Lake Tahoe on the Nevada side were starting to fade from gold to purple, a thin line of shadow creeping up the slopes.
“Alexei really does have a great sense of taste doesn’t he?”
Ted had panned around and was checking out the gorgeous architecture of the “eco-couture” mansion they were perched upon. The antler chandeliers in the banquet hall were starting to light up as the evening set into place. The room was full of catered tables, notable people, and virtual holograms of various historical spacecraft and artist depictions of the Zeta Tucanae exoplanet system. It was a pleasant setting for celebration of the 100 AU departure mark.