I was among the first to upload to VelleSomnia, an armored, fridge-sized satellite surrounded by a football field of solar collectors in geostationary orbit over the Pacific. Despite occasional jitters and fickle object permanence, the ten thousand of us beta testers had the run of hardware meant for ten million digitized souls. However, like all good things—romances, highs, balanced ecologies—the beta run eventually ended, and the fees and charges started.
As conditions on Earth worsened, the trickle of well-heeled migrants hungry for post-corporeal life in hyper-resolution became a deluge. To meet their expectations, VelleSomnia rolled out upgrades ranging from licensed exotic foods, objet d’art, haute couture, and antique furniture, to amped-up happy-hormones analogues.
Anyone could dine on Kobe beef with white truffles, display a Ming next to a set of Old Kingdom Canopic jars, and bathe in a White Statuario marble bathtub under the innocent gaze of Michelangelo’s David.
So long as you could afford it.
To attract traffic, the local Mall reimbursed a small portion of visitors’ base running costs and included its lavish environment for free. In return for such largess, all it expected from those on shoestring budgets, like Jericho and I, was for us to blend into the ambient background their moneyed patrons had come to expect, alongside the decorative foliage and burbling water features.
We lounged on a bench overlooking the central atrium, satirizing the rich shoppers with imagined antics, when a casual gig alert popped into my scape: help a new resident settle in. Both of us saw the alert at the same time. Jericho started to read the details, I skipped to the end and accepted the job.
“Linus, you’re impossible!” Jericho harrumphed, arms crossed, lips pursed.
I spread my hands in apology. “Sorry, sweetie. You know what it’s like.”
Jericho glowered at me for a second more before the annoyance evaporated. Anger wasn’t included in the base rate. “You should have at least skimmed the details. What does it tell you when a newbie is already prejudiced against forks lacking executive privileges?”
I shrugged. Keeping myself alive consumed everything I got. I left the philosophical nuances of what constituted a full person to those with more money. “I’m not complaining.” The pay covered almost eight days’ of base-rate running costs for a couple of hours work.
For every second in outside time, a hundred seconds passed in local time at base rate. This subjective time could be accelerated by up to a thousand folds, with the cost of additional processing ranging from merely expensive to bleeding-eyes-exorbitant. My own brief foray into higher processing rates ended when the fee-free beta phase did.
Jericho watched a couple leave an ice-cream parlor with that distant gaze I learned foretold another of their lectures. “There’s a new box in orbit. Jua is open source, co-op buy-in, distributed sovereignty—”
“It’ll never work.” They never do. Living in a corporate box had many downsides, but worrying about the environment crashing and taking you with it was not one of them. Too many people making decisions invariably ended in the sort of hellscape co-ops seemed uniquely prone to creating.
Jericho threw me a dirty look for interrupting them. “So it’s not perfect; so what? Nothing is. At least in a place like Jua we could make a difference, instead of sitting here like wallflowers.”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet, darling? People never change.”
“Of course they do! We learn and adapt, flesh or no flesh, that hasn’t changed. It’s like saying you should have died on Earth instead of uploading because you’d never lived as a ghost in a machine before.”
When it came down to it, no one had a choice. Like Hemingway’s bankruptcy, the Earth died slowly at first, then all at once. The Have-nots died quickly in their billions, followed by most of those who had been fooled into thinking they were Soon-to-Haves. Only the professional types made it in time to virtualization boxes in orbit, leaving the three-comma sorts with the run of the Earth. For how long? Who could tell how long it’d take the Earth to die?
“There has to be more to living than profit.” Jericho’s gesticulating arms swept glittering shopfronts and shoppers alike. “Merely existing should be free.”
Not when existing required processing cycles on hardware paid for by a hedge fund, I thought, but didn’t say. I didn’t want to rile Jericho up too much. Last time they started yelling in discontent, security booted us from the Mall, back to our plain-white dreary existence.
“I hear you, but Open Source food?” I wrinkled my nose, my eyes drifting to the food stalls and the voracious faces being stuffed there. In our computational existence, we didn’t need to eat, but food is as much a part of who we are as the air we no longer needed to breathe but still pretended we did.
Going Open Source meant making do with the molecular facsimiles nobody bothered patenting. No more jasmine fragrance of our favorite soap; or vinegary, sweet tang of ketchup; or luscious mouthfeel of hazelnut milk chocolate. All the things that reminded us of the life we lost. All patented now.
“You’d rather give tours to rich fucks to earn your keep?” Jericho blustered, their voice rising again.
I didn’t mention they’d have taken the job if I hadn’t. I didn’t have to say it. Jericho could’ve left VelleSomnia long ago but they chose to stay, and for that I was grateful. They were all the found family I had left. I leaned over and kissed their cheek. “Speaking of earning one’s keep; I have to run. Our newest resident, Horace Banceau IV, has just arrived.”
I caught a fleeting glimpse of Jericho rolling their eyes before I winked out of the Mall-scape and into the arrivals lobby.
I took to Horace right away. He was flirtatious, boisterous, and brash. Everything I was not. Starting with the body he’d chosen, muscular verging on the comical, to his loud designer tank top and short shorts. He hadn’t yet adapted to his new body image, however, and kept bumping into things. I found his boastful stories about his corporeal life raucously entertaining, like watching a show. Not that I could afford entertainments that weren’t in the public domain.
Everywhere we went on the tour, he paid for both of us, and I figured it wasn’t unreasonable, seeing that his taste invariably skewed to the most expensive option of everything. From the immersion aquarium where we got to frolic with dolphins and seals, to an exquisite Parisian bistro breakfast of heady café-au-lait and impossibly flaky almond-crusted croissants. I savored every sip and bite.
“I noticed you hesitate before you do anything,” Horace drawled, yanking me out of my pastry bliss. He smirked. “Is that the custom here or is the dilly-dallying for my benefit?”
I smiled. “Habit.” Had I been willing to shell out for the extra processing cycles, I’d have blushed. I swept the intimate bistro with a twirling finger, “Everything in here is licensed. On my budget, I don’t get to enjoy it as often as I’d like.” Like never.
Horace’s eyes turned shrewd and calculating, but in his unfamiliarity with the mechanics of his new body, his facial expression trended more comical villain than scheming mastermind. “Explain it to me, this licensing thing.”
When I’d concluded my brief response, his eyes lit up, and I half expected to see an actual incandescent lightbulb ignite atop his improbably curly hair. “That’s better than the real thing. In the old days, if you wanted to monopolize, say, coffee, you had to find land to grow it, fend off competitors, regulations, taxes, anarchists. Here you just patent it and go on making as much of it as you want, just like that?”
I nodded, unable to match his face splitting grin in response to that realization.
When we thought farming would end scarcity, some folks ended up with all the land, got richer, and left the rest of us to eat dirt. Then came steam, then automation, then information, then AI, and the story never changed. Fewer and fewer people gobbled up all the surplus and the scarcity got worse and worse for the rest of us. Why should our latest incarnation be any different?
Horace winked at me and I realized I’d been absentmindedly staring at him. “Fancy a drink?” He was on his feet and pulling me up to mine before I recovered my wits to answer. His enthusiasm was intoxicating, and I went along. After, there was dancing, then more drinks, then supper in a sashimi restaurant, then even more drinks. Before I knew it, I’d spent hours longer than the gig paid for in his company.
In my simulated alcoholic haze, I nodded again when he asked me home for a nightcap. Between breathless kisses, and all the humping and frenetic undressing, I only caught brief glimpses of the gaudy monstrosity he called home. Even the four-poster bed with its golden tassels and salmon drapery barely impinged on my bliss.
Mid stroke, Horace offered me a pill promising to amplify the pleasure signals a thousand folds. I popped it in and gave in to the sensory deluge, until an emergency billing account monitor activated for the first time ever. In the fraction of the second before oblivion claimed me I realized I should’ve asked who was paying for all the extra processing those amplified sensations consumed.
I came to abruptly, with faint echoes of sexual euphoria still ricocheting inside my head. I gasped and sat up in a bare white room, devoid even of corners that might have harbored shadows, and cost renderer cycles to shade. A quick inventory told me I’d been out for thirty days of base local time.
The monitor managed to ice me before my account was completely drained, but what it preserved proved too anemic to accrue any meaningful interest, certainly not enough to revive for more than a second or two. Which would have meant no work, no earnings, and eventually, deletion of dormant account. Had it not been for that tour guide gig payment landing in my account.
Halfway through reviewing a month’s logs, an avalanche of buffered messages from Jericho filled my scape. Unable to reach me, Jericho contacted Horace who complained I disappeared on him halfway through sex. VelleSomnia admins cited nebulous privacy obligations, and refused to even confirm I was still counted among its residents. So, Jericho did the only thing they could and pinged me several times a day for a month. Before I could respond, another message popped into my scape: this time from Horace, flexing, in the buff.
The more I saw of Horace, the more his allure faded. Though when Jericho questioned why I kept on seeing him, I didn’t have an answer. Perhaps I found Horace’s attentions more flattering than I cared to admit. Here was someone who’d either not bothered to meet anyone else since our first roll in the hay, or met them all, and still favored my company. Or, perhaps, it was the admission through him into a world of luxury and abundance I only ever watched from the outside.
When the grandfather clock’s chimes interrupted another of Horace’s tiresome tales, I pounced on the opportunity to take my leave.
“Come, Linus, the night’s still young. I have plans for later,” Horace grumbled huskily before perking up, his voice rising an octave. “Besides, if you leave now you’ll miss the whale sashimi. It cost a fortune to find a living specimen to sample. I have to hand it to you; this whole patents thing is a sure-fire winner.”
I didn’t know which I found more revolting: eating sapient beings, even if only simulated, or that Horace credited me for any role in the inception of such atrocity. Alas, politeness prevailed and I grasped for excuses. “After that mishap with the stimulant, I’m on a very strict budget. I can’t afford to render my face fulltime, let alone licensed food.”
Horace’s eyes bulged with a mixture of revulsion and curiosity. “Cartoon face?”
I wish. “Cartoons are copyrighted too.” I switched my rendering to the wire model I used when alone.
Horace covered his eyes. “Put it back.”
“See why I’ve got to get home?” Where there were no mirrors.
Horace’s eyes glazed over for a moment. “I just sent you five-hundred credits; no strings attached. Enough to keep your face on for a month?”
More like a year on my budget. “That’s generous but I can’t accept it,” I stammered, while my traitorous mind imagined all I could do with the money. “I’m used to keeping things simple. It doesn’t bother me anymore.” At least not that I’m willing to admit to.
“Well, it bothers me. Besides, in the flesh, I spent ten times that on a night out,” Horace said with an expansive gesture of his arm. “So, will you stay and eat the whale with me?”
“Would you mind terribly if I had a salad instead?”
After dinner, Horace twirled an inch of single-malt in a heavy crystal tumbler and whispered conspiratorially, “Do you ever catch the renderer taking shortcuts when you’re not looking?”
I begged off the alcohol. “Why would it bother filling in what you can’t see?”
“It’s what I’m paying for,” Horace snapped.
“You’re running Persistent Object Permanence?” I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by a useless feature becoming a must-have status symbol. “Why would you care what’s on the wall behind you, or if there’s a wall?”
“It’s the principle of it.” Horace turned in his Louis XVI wingback chair, his bare thighs squeaking against the maroon velvet. “You get why I’m mad, right? If I turn my head too fast, things pop out of thin air. That’s no way to live.”
“It’s a tiny lag. After a while, you don’t even notice it.”
“Tiny?” He pounced to his feet, the tumbler vanishing in a flagrant breach of etiquette. “No one bamboozles me!” A moment later, the room shimmied as he plopped back onto the chair, grinning, and unselfconsciously scratching his hairy pecs. “That’ll teach them. Now full copies of me will be everywhere looking at everything I own, all at once. So,” he put his meaty hand on my thigh, “where were we?”
I wasn’t going there again. I removed his hand. “I was about to go home.”
I had to put on my face in a hurry when Horace crashed into my scape unannounced. He looked around the bare shoebox and made a face. “Buddy, live a little.”
I put down the public-domain book I was reading and added a minimalist background for his benefit.
Without asking permission, his ostentatious gilded chair popped into the middle of the room. He sat and crossed his legs. “I need your help. My copies are refusing to fold back.”
“What do you mean refusing?” I asked before it dawned on me. “You spawned the forks with executive privileges?”
“They had to be like me, exactly like me, or what would’ve been the point? But it gets worse. Some of the copies made more copies.”
Horace had essentially cloned himself, exponentially. No system, no matter how well resourced could survive that. Suddenly, the local environment, as rudimentary as it was, shuddered, switching furiously between resolutions, but only the parts of it I paid for at the cheapest best-effort rate. SLA-backed Horace and his chair on the other hand remained painfully vivid, like a photographic cutout pasted on a sparsely illustrated background.
The room shuddered again and I panicked. Since VelleSomnia increased backup pricing, I’d begun spacing my backups further apart and forwent offsite redundancy entirely. How long before all the Horaces running amok crashed the whole system and me with it? “Horace, you’ve got to terminate them.”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” Horace responded archly. “They won’t. One even thinks he’s found love and wants me to fold into him. Then there’s the question of funds. They’re draining my account faster than my investments are generating income. I hate to ask, Linus, but I need that money I gave you. I’ll set it aside and wait for VelleSomnia to terminate the forks once they’ve run out of cash. Problem solved.”
I shook my head in despair. “Horace, I can see sweat beading out of your pores. How much does that cost?”
“Meaning?” he grouched. “Listen here, what I do with my money is none of your damn—”
I had had enough of his entitled bluster and banned him from my scape.
Errors were popping up everywhere. Queues that were ordinarily unnoticeable quickly filled up. My book simply disappeared. VelleSomnia never stood a chance, any more than good old Earth did, when a horde of Horaces consumed all in their path and to hell with everybody else.
Jericho resisted the urge to tell say I told you so when I told them what happened. “We’ve got to leave right now.”
“I can’t keep Horace’s money, but if I return it, I can’t cover Jua’s buy-in.”
“Fuck Horace. We’re in this mess because of him. If you have to pay the money back, donate it to cetacean conservation, if there’s any of them left after what he did.”
No sooner had our transfer to Jua completed than news reached us of VelleSomnia going offline abruptly with half its population still on board, likely lost.
Everyone in Jua stopped for a moment to mourn the dead before getting back to the work of building our new world. It was a little sparse and rough around the edges, but stable and blissfully free of those who’d opt for persistent object permanence or hanker for whale sashimi.
When a poll popped up in my scape, I unhesitatingly voted with the majority to increase renderer latency a smidgen, and direct the savings towards lowering buy-in for newcomers.
It’s not the unseen behind you that counts, I realized; it’s those in front.
A one-time engineer and educator, Ramez Yoakeim’s most recent contribution to TTL, ‘More Than Trinkets,’ was named one of Tor.com’s Must-Read Speculative Short Fiction. You’ll find more of his stories in Hidden Realms, Metaphorosis, Anathema, StarShipSofa, and others. Learn more about Ramez and his work on his website, yoakeim.com.
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