The New Space Opera 2 Read Free Page B

advice. I scouted out some other survivors. Turned out, it was interesting what some people had done in their new incarnations as Fleet-data. The Erasmuses had made it easy for like-minded folks to find one another and to create environments to suit them. The most successful of these cliques, as they were sometimes called, were the least passive ones: the ones with a purpose. Purpose kept people lively. Passive cliques tended to fade into indifference pretty quickly, and the purely hedonistic ones soon collapsed into dense orgasmic singularities; but if you were curious about the world, and hung out with similarly curious friends, there was a lot to keep you thinking.
    None of those cliques suited me in the long run, though. Oh, I made some friends, and I learned a few things. I learned how to access the Fleet’s archival data, for instance—a trick you had to be careful with. If you did it right, you could think about a subject as if you were doing a Google search, all the relevant information popping up in your mind’s eye just as if it had been there all along. Do it too often or too enthusiastically, though, and you ran the risk of getting lost in the overload—you might develop a “memory” so big and all-inclusive that it absorbed you into its own endless flow.
    (It was an eerie thing to watch when it happened. For a while, I hungout with a clique that was exploring the history of the nonhuman civilizations that had been raptured up by the Fleet in eons past…until the leader of the group, a Jordanian college kid by the name of Nuri, dived down too far and literally fogged out. He got this look of intense concentration on his face, and, moments later, his body turned to wisps and eddies of fluid air and faded like fog in the sunlight. Made me shiver. And I had liked Nuri—I missed him when he was gone.)
    But by sharing the effort, we managed to safely learn some interesting things. (Things the Erasmuses could have just told us, I suppose; but we didn’t know the right questions to ask.) Here’s a big for-instance: although every species was mortal after it was raptured up—every species eventually fogged out much the way poor Nuri had—there were actually few very long-term survivors. By that, I mean individuals who had outlived their peers, who had found a way to preserve a sense of identity in the face of the Fleet’s hyper-complex data torrent.
    We asked our Erasmuses if we could meet one of these long-term survivors.
    Erasmus said no, that was impossible. The Elders, as he called them, didn’t live on our timescale. The way they had preserved themselves was by dropping out of realtime.
    Apparently, it wasn’t necessary to “exist” continuously from one moment to the next. You could ask the Fleet to turn you off for a day or a week, then turn you on again. Any moment of active perception was called a saccade , and you could space your saccades as far apart as you liked. Want to live a thousand years? Do it by living one second out of every million that passes. Of course, it wouldn’t feel like a thousand years, subjectively; but a thousand years would flow by before you aged much. That’s basically what the Elders were doing.
    We could do the same, Erasmus said, if we wanted. But there was a price tag attached to it. “Timesliding” would carry us incomprehensibly far into a future nobody could predict. We were under continual attack by the Invisible Enemy, and it was possible that the Fleet might lose so much cohesion that we could no longer be sustained as stable virtualities. We wouldn’t get a long life out of it, and we might well be committing a kind of unwitting suicide.
    â€œYou don’t really go anywhere,” Erasmus summed up. “In effect, you just go fast. I can’t honestly recommend it.”
    â€œDid I ask for your advice? I mean, what are you, after all? Just somelittle fragment of the Fleet mind