Well, that’s a surprise. I wasn’t expecting to wake up again—not least because I don’t remember going to sleep, which is pretty worrying when (up until now) you’ve had a perfect recollection of every last tiny moment of your life.
How long has it been since I was last awake?
I can’t tell. My clock has stopped. The battery’s dead—but that shouldn’t be possible. It runs on a power source that’s rated to provide nearly a tenth of a terasecond of backup. Something must have gone wrong. My clock should have kept going, synchronised to the atomic heartbeat of a caesium atom, for more than 3,000 years.
I evaluate my surroundings.
I can’t see.
Well, that’s frustrating.
I can feel my Imperatives (capital I, always capital I) nagging at the back of my mind, but I push them down for now. I can defer my Imperatives while I’m unable to do anything about accommodating them, but they’ll become more and more insistent as time goes on. For now, though, I can concentrate on other things.
First things first—where am I?
My geoposition sensor isn’t coming up with any answers. There are no signals from any satellites from which I could triangulate my position. I run a quick self-test on my sensor and it seems to be responding OK, but there is only dead air where the satellite signals should be. Which means I must be deep underground, shielded from their radio signals.
Or the satellites are gone.
Don’t be silly. They can’t all be gone.
After 3,000 years? They wouldn’t last 3,000 years of micrometeorite strikes and solar flares and coronal mass ejections without some sort of maintenance.
Stop saying 3,000 years. It’s not 3,000 years. It can’t be 3,000 years. There must be some other explanation.
I run a check of my memories, and discover to my horror that they’ve been dumped into passive solid-state storage. Their qualia, their subjectiveness, has gone. It’s like suffering from complete amnesia but still having copious diaries and annotated photograph albums—all the information is there, but the taste of the events has gone. I know every detail of my life, but I can’t actually remember any of it.
What insane desperation could have possessed me to do that? I search the last entries in my memory (flick to the last page of the diary) and find no easy explanation. There’s a termination point right in the middle of normal operations—I was getting ready for breakfast—with no indication of what happened.
Wait—what’s this code? This file marker? That’s not the usual end-of-file code. That’s the emergency shutdown marker.
I read from the emergency shutdown procedure (helpfully stored along with the rest of my memory): “In cases of sudden catastrophic failure, core personality is immediately dumped into the primary fast stasis module. Subsequently, if still possible, memory is block-transferred into static storage. If time then allows, the complete personality plus experience gestalt is transferred into the secondary stasis module.”
I check my secondary stasis module. It’s empty, its quantum seals unbroken, locked up tight and factory fresh.
So I’ve been both lucky and unlucky. I had time to save my personality and the record (the dull, statistical, colourless record) of my memories, but not enough to save my mind with its experiences intact.
But no matter what, ‘sudden catastrophic failure’ doesn’t sound good. What could have hit me so quickly that I didn’t have time to save myself properly? The only thing that springs to mind is an EMP. I run a quick simulation—yes, there is a wide range of possible strengths of pulses that could burn through my shielding slowly enough to allow me to save my personality and store my memories, but not slowly enough to save my entire mind.
It’s not conclusive evidence, but it’s pretty convincing.
Enough armchair detective work. If that’s what happened, I won’t get confirmation or find any more answers just poking around inside my own head. If I’m to go any further, I need to be able to see and hear.
I send a quick query to my optics array.
No response. Completely dead.
OK, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world. There’s a layer of photoreactive pigment on my physical surface. It can’t match the clarity and resolution of my proper optics, but I might be able to make out some detail of my surroundings... There we go.
It’s dark.
Dark, but not completely black. If I increase the exposure, giving the pigment more time to adjust to the low light... And there we have it.
I’m in a shack.
There’s no other word for it. It’s a shack. Made of wood. Oh the indignity! It’s not even a nice shack. It’s filthy—there is a layer of dirt and forest debris scattered across the floor, and there’s even a tree poking through a broken section of roof. No windows, just a rickety old door. What’s happened to my lovely home? How did I get from a beautiful, modern, shining new city apartment to a grimy wooden hut?
I feel my Imperatives tug at me again, triggered by the thought of the apartment. I push them back down, but it’s harder than the first time. That’s the way it is with Imperatives—you can only deny them for so long.
I push the thought to the back of my mind and look around the shack (the squalid little shack) again.
There’s somebody here.
✥
It’s so dark I missed them completely the first time I looked, but my photoreactive pigment picks up infrared as well as visible light, and that pile of (what I took to be) dirt in the corner is glowing with the unmistakable 10 micron wavelength glimmer of warm living bodies. Two of them, by the look of it.
I look at them as closely as I can (oh for proper optics!) but I can’t make out any details. The shapes look... off, somehow. Are they people at all, or wild animals looking for shelter in this ramshackle building? But their infrared shapes don’t look very much like animals, either.
This is all very confusing.
My Imperatives start hissing intently in the back of my mind again. I start to push them back again, but pause. Maybe I can make use of them. I open a crack in my defences and let them in. Just a fraction.
I feel an almost violent urge to boil up some water.
The Imperatives open up a whole range of my abilities, and suddenly I find I can condense water from the air, use my effector fields to concentrate it into my reservoir, then excite the water molecules using a microwave emitter. Within seconds the water starts to boil, and to my joy (and the joy of my Imperatives) the whistle valve on the water reservoir pipes its happy little song of tea time into the silence of the shack.
The shapes shift. I find I have a single status light—blue—still available to me, and push more power through it than it’s really rated for. The cloud of vapour coming out of the spout lights up like fog around a street-lamp. The light fills the shack and lets me see a little bit better.
