Wake Me In The Future (7 page)

I narrowed my eyes and looked to the ground, ‘I am Ankit.’

My friend offered a sympathetic smile, ‘That’s because you’re missing Helen Richard, and you’re
stuck here
, as you put it, but this isn't the norm, its only temporary, and although I admit this would probably be torture to someone from this time, people like yourself should be capable of spending some time alone.’

I was deflated. Discovering the previous day that I was in an underground world, buried deep under the surface of the planet hadn't helped, but I realised there was no point in carrying on the conversation when Ankit was like this. I’d get nowhere, even if I argued all day, so I decided to yield for now, and instead I told him about the strange noises at the door the previous night.

‘It was probably someone forgetting where they were going’ he said quite dismissively. Which initially surprised me, considering how he’d reacted to the intrusion by Ramoon, but the look in his eyes said something completely different. And there was also something else at odds with his behaviour; he’d suddenly lost his happy demeanour, as if he was depressed for some reason. Not a hint of a smile.
Perhaps people still have off days.
Whatever the reason, I wasn’t in the mood for asking any personal questions, and so for now I let it pass.

As we were travelling back to the Information centre, a row of windows suddenly appeared along one wall of the shuttle. It had obviously stopped, because as I looked out I could see we were in what seemed to be an enclosed transparent bridge spanning a large open area. For all intents and purpose we were above a town centre and I wondered if we’d come this way before or we’d been re-directed for some reason.

The open space I was looking down on was surrounded by small trees and bushes, and intermingled were groups of chairs and tables, where people sat eating and drinking outside cafes and bars. There must have also been shops down there because some of the people were carrying what looked like sacks. I couldn’t make out any details of the people as they went about what must be their everyday activities, but what I did notice was that the vast majority of them were Asian.

Ankit had said we were in an underground city called India Prime, so we must be beneath India.
I thought.

I tried to take it all in but it was difficult to judge the size of this place because everything was enclosed and the tube was halfway between the ground and what I could see was an illuminated ceiling. Patches of mist hovered below it so that from the ground it must have projected a convincing illusion of clouds in a summer sky. As I was about to ask Ankit why we’d stopped, he spoke.

‘Something for you to look forward to Richard’ he said from behind me.

But I didn’t respond because my interest had suddenly been captured by the large screen that dominated the central area to one side of the square, and which had also captivated the attention of most of the people on the ground, because they were beginning to form a crowd around it. A demonstration was being broadcast and the image suddenly focused on a man holding a banner up to the screen. It read, ‘
don’t let them kill us all off – protect the humans.’

Ankit followed my gaze as I lifted my arm to point out of the window. ‘I would have thought we’d be beyond demonstrating by now,’ I said.

But before he replied, the images on the other side of the window suddenly turned to a blur, as if water had been thrown sideways onto a wet painting, and I knew the train had sped up to its normal velocity.

As the windows disappeared Ankit sighed and said, ‘I am afraid there’s always going to be a disruptive element in any free society, and like in your day, we have ours.’

‘Yes, but what was all that about -
protect the humans
? What have we got to be protected from?’

‘That was Jon Numan, the leader of a group of protesters who all suffer from paranoid delusions, but don’t worry about it at the moment Richard, you’ve got more important things to learn before you need to concern yourself with any of that.’

From which I understood to mean, ‘
don’t ask me anymore about this, because you won’t get any answers
.’

Resigned to the fact that at the moment I had very little control over the flow of knowledge I was receiving, I just nodded and wondered what I was going to learn today. Hoping I’d be shown more remarkable achievements like those I’d learned of on the previous day; I’d been so impressed by the construction of the huge cities, created by the descendants of my time.

But I’d only just begun to discover this new world and was totally unaware that what I’d been shown so far would be surpassed a million times by what I was about to learn.

Chapter 08
– The Goldilocks Zone

On arrival at the
Table Room
, as I was now beginning to think of it, there was no need for Ankit to issue any instructions, I dutifully sat myself in the same chair I’d previously used and before long was welcoming the warm dreamlike state that overtook me.

This time, rather than seeing images through the hovering windows, I felt like I was actually floating in space. Just hovering, facing the Earth. It seemed I was about to learn more of the strange new world I’d been revived in.

One of many it seemed, because my position changed so that I could now see a large group of Earth-like planets, each with their own dusty grey moon, fashioned to act as the original; global sized pace makers sustaining the ebb and flow of the life giving oceans on the planets beneath them.

The view around me panned out to reveal more of the Solar system, showing these new Earths circling the Sun like a string of living pearls. The technology providing these views was incredible,
like a celestial version of Google Earth
, I thought, only this really felt like I was floating in space,
perhaps this was the latest version
?

I was in awe of these images and the speed in which I was moving in and out of the scenes. I was vaguely aware of a disembodied voice providing an audio commentary that underpinned what I was seeing, but I was unable to focus on it, instead just being aware that it was there in the background and bolstering the visual information in some subconscious manner. I had no control of what I was seeing, it was obviously being dictated by what the system thought I needed to see, but the boy in me couldn’t help but look forward to when I could get access to this myself.

Then everything spun around, offering up a momentary bout of dizziness before subsiding and allowing me to become aware that I was being pulled away from the Sun, passed the inner planets and passed Jupiter, and further out where the orbits of Saturn and Uranus should have been, until I was confronted with an amazing sight hovering before me.

The planet Neptune was being dismantled, its ethereal rings gone, and the familiar blue tinge of its atmosphere had been turned a dusky rancid green as a result of its depleted mass. Its eight major satellites were also absent, replaced by a collection of Moon sized machines, stretching their monstrous life sucking tentacles deep into what was left of the planet’s atmosphere, like celestial vampires, sucking away its life force and disgorging it Sunwards; I guessed, to be used to help make the new worlds.
The same fate as the long gone moons,
I thought.

I followed the trail of material, as it joined that being transported from the Kyper belt and elsewhere in the outer Solar system. Like a planet-wide meteor storm leading back towards the Sun, controlled and directed by an army of shepherding spacecraft.

As I returned to the life sustaining area around the Sun I saw that the material was being manoeuvred to collide at a predetermined point, where it would presumably create a gravity-well that other material could later be aimed at, letting the laws of physics do the main work of creating the globe. After which, advanced macro and nano machinery would accelerate the development of these human habitats beyond imagination, forming the ocean bearing planets I now saw hovering in space.

Nature was being manipulated and its natural processes accelerated on a grand scale by these human descendants. They were fashioning the Solar system to their own needs; several of the outer planets, the Asteroid and Kyper belts either gone or being dismantled. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the advanced technology this all required. How had they compensated for the huge gravitational shift that must have been caused by the movement of such a vast amount of material? It should surely have knocked the balance of the whole system out of kilter.

The strong desire for familiarity among these people was inspiring them to produce cloned worlds of the mother planet and its moon. I was now looking down on the Sun and the elliptical plane of the planets and could see the vast circle that these ‘Earths’ made around it, like one of Saturn’s rings but incomplete and encompassing a Star instead of a planet. The sight was so overwhelming that it was impossible to appreciate its true scale.

There must have been over fifty planets but I could see there was still plenty of space for more, before the Sun was completely surrounded.
But where had all the material come from? Exactly how many of the major planets besides Neptune were being dismantled.
No doubt most of the rock and ice moons of the Solar system had already been sacrificed.

The human race must have expanded beyond my wildest dreams.

When this was complete it was surely going to be humanity’s greatest achievement, although I knew many in my time that would condemn me for considering it such. The obsessive hysteria that grew out of the 'Green' movement in my first life had given rise to an almost bitter hatred of humanity's use of any resource.

As I looked on, I couldn’t help thinking about the Dyson Sphere I’d read about in my boyhood science fiction novels, but this one was being made from planets, and was just as impressive. The scale of it took my breath,
it can’t get better than this
, I thought.

But my old friend, fate, was about to deal me a different card altogether; because for me, things were about to get much, much worse.

Chapter 09
– Here’s My Robot

The space around me vanished, snuffed out of existence in a fraction of a second, and I was once again standing in the darkness, confronted by the strange dimensional windows. I was being shown a montage of images from history, and this time these were most definitely supported by full glorious sound. What I was seeing were people, both real and fictional, being ridiculed for expressing the desire to live longer or delay the natural decay of their bodies. I saw alchemists trying to create the elixir of youth, charlatans selling hair restorative potions at fairs, people flocking to hot baths to cure ailments and vampires, sucking blood to sustain their immortality.

The scenes before me were progressing through the ages until magazine and newspaper headlines from the 20
^th
century appeared. They showed products for staying younger, potions to prolong life, vitamin regimes, lifestyle changes, and plastic surgery. Then I saw a man advertising cryogenics, it was the same company Helen and I had used and I was mesmerised as one of the silver containment pods hovered before me.

I was being shown the history of the desire of humans to extend their life spans and seek immortality.

The scenes through the windows were beyond my time now, because there were headlines hailing genetic breakthroughs that hadn’t happened by the time I’d died; stories of people actually becoming young again. ‘The first woman to reach 200’ was one headline. ‘Eternalists achieve their goal, aging removed from the human condition,’ was the next headline.

Then surprisingly a different story appeared, at odds with the flow so far, ‘Majority choose to die,’ said a newsreader hovering in the screen, ‘it seems that most people are turning their backs on the opportunity to live forever.’

Then, another scientific paper displayed the headline, ‘Eternalists treat their children at birth’ - Before a huge screen on a wall flashed the message, ‘The Darwin effect – evolution wins out, Eternalists outnumber general population for the first time in history.’

I was enjoying this; I was entranced; it was the type of thing Helen and I had dreamed we’d find; a future full of people that wanted immortality as much as we did.

The montage continued.

The pictures I was now confronted with were of deaths, and above the scene, of what I thought looked like a huge disaster, the headline ‘Eternalists not immortal after all – 56 die in earthquake - oldest 210.’

Reports of murders and suicides flashed before my eyes. ‘Fear of death heightened – have we got more to lose? - A world of recluses – cautious to the point of phobia - too scared to take any risk at all.’

‘Where to next on Immortality, as scientists suggest discarding the human body.’

Then a clip from a news report of a mass protest in what looked like St Peters Square in Rome. People were waving banners that read, ‘don’t turn us into robots.’

Where was this going
? I began to wonder as my subconscious began to ponder its significance.

I was now looking into a room that looked like an auditorium of a University, and from the racial makeup of the audience it must have been somewhere in India. Everyone was focused on the stage, and the Sun that shone through the windows painted the faces it fell on with that healthy summer glow of youth. Behind an Asian man standing on the stage a large electronic screen projected the words, ‘
Shedding the corporeal shell - What’s to be afraid of?
’, and as I watched, he began to speak.

‘Not since we immortals became the only type of humans, have we had to fear any change in our physical condition. But we really don’t have anything to fear, this is just another evolutionary step for our race, the new bodies feel the same as our biological ones and, as I am about to demonstrate, you can’t tell the difference.’

Then he said something to the room that I didn’t quite catch. It sounded like, ‘could all the non-biologs now stand up.’