Chapter 5
A Tolerable Purgatory
Ker-shlumph, and slide.
Guh-shlomph, and slide.
With snoot determined, Tippi pushed the parcel down The Grand Fusilli.
When her nostrils cramped, she rammed it, and when her skull ached, she kicked it. Such was the pig’s labor: inch after inch, hour by hour, and deep into the evening. Gravity was her co-pilot, as she wanted to reach the frigidarium by sunup.
She found kicking to be the least effective tactic: duh-shlumph, no slide.
Tippi was wrangling with an old thatched sack. The bag was a lifeless khaki, but she knew the fabric was fancy, as it didn’t crumble upon her touch.
To hasten matters, she hugged the inside curve of the Fusilli; the spiral ramp was built for sapiens and their gewgaws, not a teacup hypermini and her oversized clutch.
Be grateful, Tippi told herself. You’re going downhill.
When she arrived at Antique Ops, the door was half open, and threatening to fly out of its frame.
Something had gummed up the pneumatics, leaving the thick, cavework door rattling from the ceiling.
The door shuddered and clanked, as some wizened pinion struggled with its third day of work since the 33rd century. Between the solar shade at .0002% and the storeroom door posting a 50% success rate, Wee Sheol was going hard.
The malfunctioning door gladdened Tippi, as Lina was the only one who could lift it. Mood improved, she entered Antique Ops, blasé to the guillotine of quartz above.
The pig started with the nearest stacks, nosing the cubbies for clues. They were crammed with footlockers, like the one that held the chess set.
After several minutes of uninformed prodding, Tippi heard a wet whistle from points unseen. In the everyday torpor of Wee Sheol, noises were rarely incidental, and the gushy trill picked up as she ran closer.
The sound was coming from a vittles sluice, which was spraying optimized gravy all over, in drippy fletches.
Tippi stared at the foul spigot, and the torrent of gravy stopped.
Suddenly, a hard cantaloupe tumbled out of the sluice: rolling through the gravy, and into a nearby cubby.
For the lack of a better idea, Tippi followed the melon.
The cantaloupe came to rest next to the thatched sack, unbesmirched by dust. Lina’d cracked Antique Ops twice, so its bounty was mostly pristine, even if the climate control took a hit around chess.
The cantaloupe was too much of an omen to be a coincidence. She began lugging the parcel back to Xoz, praying he’d holstered his micro-personalities.
Blah-shloink, and slide.
When Tippi was five days debrined, she needed answers:
“Why is my cranial implant called a diadem?”
“A diadem was a hat worn by important humans,” explained Lina.
“But my diadem is inside of my head.”
“That’s because of marketing,” said Lina.
“I can’t say I’m familiar with the concept.”
“Humans enjoyed pretending their technology was on top of the skulls, instead of buried inside of them.”
Tippi chewed on this, before dismissing it as sapiens-grade weirdness.
“Lina, are there any humans left?”
The n’arbiter had waited 7,000 years for this question:
“No. Yes? Maybe.”
“What kind of answer is that?”
“A reasonable case can be made for humanity’s survival. On one hand, I could see sapiens getting by on limited resources, albeit in a far quieter manner than usual. For example, humans could be roughing it out in remote extraplan-zones. Perhaps there’s an enclave of Martian tinker-gatherers, or an off-the-books missionary vessel somewhere in the Kuiper Belt, living off salvage and vermiculture. As for earthbound humans, our century shelter was built for this very circumstance. I was born out of a philanthropic ideal, to house humans displaced by state collapse.”
Lina’s tone began to wander:
“Unfortunately, I consider these scenarios unlikely. Space travel demands resources, and human attempts at mass terraforming never exactly got past greenhouses. Plus, any self-contained off-planet settlements likely would’ve hit their genetic bottleneck.”
“Genetic bottleneck?” said Tippi.
Lina went deep, five days in:
“For a species to thrive, there needs to be enough of a population to prevent inbreeding and the circulation of deleterious traits. Just ask the woolly mammoths of Siberia, who went extinct 14,000 years ago.”
“What’s a woolly mammoth?”
“A woolly mammoth was a mammal,” said Lina. “Many times larger than you.”
“Wow!”
Tippi’s mental mammoth was a pig, the size of the droneport, and Lina detailed the tragedy of Mammuthus primigenius:
“14,000 years ago, the last of the woolly mammoths died out on an island in the Arctic Circle. Most of the mainland mammoths had passed on some 6,000 years prior, but isolated populations persisted in the far north. The last mammoths led a limited existence, mating with their relatives and contracting diabetes, until routine overtook them. Without a reliable cloning program or the assets to support genetic treatments, extraplanetary sapiens likely followed the mammoths. It’s far more probable there’s a synthetic intelligence of terrestrial origin out there somewhere, pressing the luck of the last solar sail.”
The pig cocked her head, quizzical:
“My core instinct out of the brine is to imprint on the nearest human. So what you’re telling me is that there are no more sapiens left to imprint on, yeah?”
As Sus domesticus commodus, Tippi was stuck in the liminal state between activation and user personalization. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it also wasn’t what she anticipated. Later, Xoz would dub her situation “a tolerable purgatory.”
“Correct,” said Lina. “It is extremely unlikely either of us will meet a human.”
“Well then,” said Tippi.
Lina expounded on the apocalypse:
“My projections of earthbound survival are even less favorable. At a full population, a century shelter’s larder will go for 2,000 years; that was the Neo-Massive standard. I never heard from my sister shelters, but even the most optimistic estimates say their vaults ran dry millennia ago.”
“Why didn’t they contact you?”
“I have no idea,” stippled Lina. “I wish I did.”
“Where’d your humans end up?”
“I do not know the answer to that question, nor do I ever expect to. Other people could be alive thanks to bionics and radical gene therapies, but neither life-X tech was built for the long haul.”
“Why’s that?”
“A few reasons,” said Lina. “We’re in the 13th Millennium. Back in the Third, bespoke cybernetics were far too expensive for most sapiens. Healthy installation and upkeep required a dedicated in-house team, immune to palace drama and ransomware.”
“Complicated,” said Tippi.
“Indeed. Leasing was an option, but your maintenance corp could go bust and sell your case to a less scrupulous firm. More than one human woke up one day, only to learn that their kidneys were property of a faceless LLC. Stories like that stifled consumer interest in cybernetic life-X: people’s tendons would brick, and the churn would lose it. But after a while, the outrage became wallpaper, and everybody just lived with it. Tippi, are you dozing?”
“I’m awake,” lied the pig who’d nodded off around “faceless LLC.” She bolted upright, out of decorum.
“Eventually, even the wealthy were stuck,” said Lina. “It’s hard to get a new aorta when your repair firm went out of business 75 years ago, and the Mafia has a chokehold on the secondary market. The model was flawed from the start: the mortal resent the immortal, and immortality only works if you were never born in the first place.”
“That’s why you were able to spend thousands of years in complete solitude,” admired Tippi.
“Oh my wee bean, you are paying attention,” chuckled Lina. “And you’re right, I’m very lucky not to be frightened by a silent eternity alone. If I had a physical form, I’d scratch your ears.”
Tippi snuffled, and Lina continued lambasting life eternal:
“As I was saying, in the late 2000s, life extension tech resulted in a mass reshuffle of social mores. The notion of genetic dynasty was one of its more notable casualties, as it’s difficult to appreciate your grandchildren when they have grandchildren, and everybody’s carving up your estate at your 178th birthday party. Further, the sapiens consciousness wasn’t designed to live forever. Nobody signs up for an extra 300 years, just to become an alcoholic a decade in. Versions of this scenario played out every day, but humanity kept tacking on the years. My, they were masters at ignoring things.”
The pig had fetched herself prunes; she was born to chat, but could only oink-and-nod through so much terminology.
“The situation got worse in the 31st Century. When the last of the state actors deregulated elective genetics, ethical considerations grew twee. Species were going extinct by the furlong, and nobody wanted to be next. The Free Science movement gained traction, and personal liberty was defined by how many atom smashers you could shove inside a studio apartment. Fly-by-night operators promised discount centriole realignments, and just gave you meth. Appendix hacking became a thing, and everyone had jellyfish DNA. My internal records end on 8-27-3253; there was a highly anticipated photosynthetic eczema slated for Q2 ’54. What do you think the lesson is here?”
“I think I need to study the blueberries next,” said Tippi, ever the realist.
“I meant with regards to human attempts at life-X.”
Lina knew Tippi was of a corporate provenance; the pig wasn’t supposed to come out of the brine yelling about how every technological epoch since The Industrial Revolution was iterating on the Dickensian workhouse, but her answer still surprised.
“From what you’re telling me,” chewed Tippi. “Sapiens sound overly occupied with, uh, their stuff.”
“Interesting,” said Lina, half-bracing for a lecture on the dangers of consumerism from the corporate mascot. “Do elaborate.”
“What I mean is this: they were addicted to the present. They were so focused on whatever came within the next 30 seconds, they never noticed they were repeating themselves. Lina, tell me: what was the biggest problem with life extension in the 3rd Millennium?”
“Immortality came with planned obsolescence. Nobody should spend their eternity going from swap meet to swap meet, looking for a system-compliant islets of Langerhans, but they did.”
“Now,” said Tippi. “Why did life-X fail in the 4th Millennium?”
“From the bit I saw, people lived longer, if drearier. Remember, this was an era when folks grew webbed fingers out of peer pressure. That, and the eugenics cults, cyber-cults, company towns that gave way to founder cults, fertility cults, gun cults, bodybuilding cults, thrill-kill cults, and the old-time religions reskinned as MLMs, which, were in turn, cults. For a while there, most things were cults. When the world’s incomprehensible by design and apathetic with intent, one finds a safe harbor in whoever’s around.”
“See, different millennia,” observed Tippi. “Human constant.”
“They were running in place, after a while,” said Lina. “Dressing up the same ideas in new fashions, treating sleep deprivation as a virtue.”
“Goodness,” gasped Tippi. “What was wrong with them?”
“You know, I never entirely figured that out.”
When Tippi was 731 days debrined, she needed sleep.
The pig made it back to the frigidarium: just past midnight, smarting all over, and her haul in tow. The khaki bag had survived the trip, despite absorbing the vituperation of a pig who wouldn’t see daylight again until June.
The mollusk was back to normal, at least.
“Pig!” bleated Xoz. “The brine wore off an hour ago, and I’ve been stuck here ever since!”
He was lying in the lagoon, pink and pancaked.
The shallows couldn’t accommodate his half ton of body, so Xoz was reduced to crawling flat on his suckers, shimmering for help.
“I feel like an oil spill!” he said.
“Xoz, what are you doing there? We all know you’re a bobber.”
“My tentacles caucused, and voted to rescue you, so here I am.”
“How were you going to rescue me?”
“I don’t know! Someone started quoting Mike Christ, and one thing led to another!”
Mike “The Hitman” Christ was an early sapiens varietal who cost less than Xoz, adjusted for inflation.
“The Hitman” made his debut 600 years before Xoz. The mollusk saw himself in Mike Christ, as they both represented corporate interests made flesh. The birth of Mike Christ would come at the expense of Christendom’s historical longevity, as his existence cemented a global consensus Christianity and capitalism were at loggerheads.
It started in the 2200s, when activist investors began pressuring genetics firms to build a living god. When the big players passed on blasphemy, disruptors and old-money liches pooled their billions into their own “pack-alpha boy-god.”
“They say I’m the Anti-Christ,” the pack-alpha boy-god would say, as an adult, on occasion, at strangers’ graduation parties. “But you know me: I’m Mike Christ.”
The beginning of the end was Mike’s 11th birthday, where he learned his parents weren’t his real parents, “all were to kneel,” and his present was a catchphrase: “What would Jesus don’t?”
Mike Christ died at 137 years old, perpetually three weeks ahead of his problems, living most of his life by a beach. By then, Nietzschean supermen were considered more trouble than they were worth, and the third generation of Tippis was selling out.
“So did you find the package?”
“The beige package? The heavy one?”
“Yes!”
“I did. I hate your package.”
“Commodus, you are good! You translated my brine-tongue tweakings and knew to look on the same shelf where you found the chess set.”
“Of course,” lied Tippi. “Shelves and tweaking.”
“Pig, I’m proud of you, but I need you to pass me the bag. Otherwise, we’re going nowhere.”
Tippi gave the parcel a wan kick. It floated into the shallows, where it was intercepted by spatula arms.
“Hello,” doted Xoz. “It’s been a minute.”
The octopus unraveled the parcel. His eight arms unfolded a translucent substance, plastic and decadent. His tentacles wove through this gossamer stuff, pulling the see-through sheathes across his crag.
“Mint,” chirruped Xoz. “Mojito.”
“Are you still on drugs?”
“I came down 45 minutes ago,” said Xoz. “This is my brineday present, if you must know.”
Tippi plopped down on the shoreline, allowing herself a sad squeal.
“I don’t see why you’re upset,” said Xoz. “You’re getting something, too.”
“I know I live in a state of befuddlement, but most days it skews enjoyable.”
“I always assumed you understood the concept of a brineday,” said Xoz.
“Not that!” said Tippi.
“Oh, you’re talking about the storeroom. How was it?”
“I chased a melon.”
Tippi then stood up, and addressed the grotto:
“WHERE’S LINA?”
“Lina will be with us,” said Xoz. “Sooner than you know.”
He was getting real torqued up down there.
“You and I are going to fix this,” he promised. “But first, we’re getting your present.”
“What?” sputtered Tippi.
“Happy brineday!” sang Xoz.
The mollusk stood up, and walked on dry land.