| Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3 |
Mateo woke up lying facedown in the dirt. He stood himself up, and looked
around. He definitely wasn’t in the train station anymore, but that didn’t
tell him much. Any number of domes looked like this, with the lush jungle,
and the clear blue sky. There was something extremely familiar about it,
though, especially when he looked down over the edge of the mountain that he
was on, and saw smoke billowing up from the valley. This was what he woke up
to just before he learned that he was in the afterlife simulation. He took
another look around, now with fresh eyes. Yeah, this was exactly what it
looked like. He could have been dreaming, or it could have been something
that Hrockas found out about, and recreated it in one of the domes. But why,
though?
The only answers were in the direction of that smoke, so he started walking
down towards it. No one else came out of the trees to do the same, so at
least that much was different. He continued on down until he reached the
amphitheater, just as he had the first time he died. No, it wasn’t the
first. Ah, who could keep count?
A woman was on stage, smiling kindly, and waiting for him patiently. She was
pressing a clipboard into her belly, which she glanced back down to now.
“Mateo Matic?”
“Indeed.”
“Have a seat,” the clipboard lady offered, pointing towards the seating.
“We’re waiting for one more.”
Only one other person was sitting there already. It was another woman,
perhaps in her thirties. She looked scared and-or nervous. He left two seats
between them. “Hey,” he tried to say in the calmest voice he had. “It’s
gonna be okay.”
“Am I dead?”
“You may have died, but you survived it.” He inhaled, and admired the
digital beauty surrounding them. “And you’ll go on...indefinitely. Your life
now will be longer than your first one was. In a trillion years, you might
not even remember it.”
“You act like you’ve done this before.”
He nodded. “I have. They let me go back, because I had more work to do in
base reality, but now... Now I think I’ll just wait for my friends to join
me. Could be a while. We’ll all be okay, though.”
The woman stood up, and sidestepped over to sit right next to him. She
remained there for a moment before working up the nerve to give him a hug.
The counselor smiled at them, but didn’t say anything. She then looked up as
the last guy was jogging down the hill.
“Sorry! Sorry, I see smoke, my instinct is to move away from it, not
towards it.”
“It’s all right, Brian. We have all the time in the world.”
“Cool.” He sat down on Mateo’s other side.
“Hello, my name is Keilix Oliver, and as you have all surmised, you have
died. Fortunately for you, some people long ago decided that they didn’t
like death, so they built a computer program where the deceased could live
on in a simulation. That simulation has since been defunct. They were hosted
by a powerful society of advanced intelligences who grew to see them more as
a nuisance, and a bit of a power hog. Do not be alarmed, though, because the
120 billion or so people who were in there at the time managed to escape—if
you can believe it—to another universe. I don’t know that much about it as I
have never been there. You see, when the hosts discovered that the
identities in the simulation had all left, they actually didn’t bother to
shut it down. It was no longer taking up too many resources, and there
didn’t seem to be any reason to end it. That is how I survived, as did a few
others.
“To explain a little more, the sim was not one single world. You could
travel between different environments, each with their own laws of simulated
physics. I just so happened to be in the middle of traveling between two of
these worlds when the evacuation happened. Lots of people were doing that,
of course, but they were closer to one side, or the other. I was right in
the middle, so when I came out on the other side, I was alone. I didn’t make
it through evacuation. Didn’t know how. Didn’t even know that it happened. I
was just confused. The hosts discovered our presence—the rounding errors—and
brought us all together. They offered to facilitate our exit to join the
others in the new universe, which a few of us agreed to. The rest, we stayed
here to keep the lights on. If we didn’t, when you died, you would just be
dead.” She gestured towards all the empty seats. “As you can see, death is
quite rare these days. The mortality rate used to be at 100%, but now life
is a lot safer. It still happens. Accidents and errors, and people who just
never upgraded from their normal organic bodies. You are three of the
exceptions. You are the only three who died today. Well, it was yesterday,
but... And you died a year ago, or something?”
“Yeah, it gets screwy,” Mateo admitted.
Keilix nodded. “Anyway, you can stay here if you want. The hosts did
eventually dismantle and cannibalize most of the servers that the afterlife
simulation was running on, but we still have plenty of space for a moderate
population. You can also move on to the other universe, if you’re
interested. Again, I can’t tell you anything about it, but I hear it’s nice.
You can’t go back home, though. Your friends and family can’t find out what
the endgame is. We don’t know for sure what would happen, but there’s a
strong chance that people would start killing themselves out of pure
curiosity. We just can’t handle that many people anymore. The system only
works at this scale, because deaths have become so few and far between.”
“Did you know Serkan Demir?” Mateo blurted out.
Keilix smirked. “Yeah.”
“Cool.” He turned towards the other guy. “Did you know Lincoln Rutherford?”
“Yeah, I went to school with him.”
“Small world.”
“Do we have a connection?” the newly dead woman asked Mateo.
“I dunno, what’s your name?”
“Cecelia Massey.”
Mateo reached for his bag to check whether she was on a list of people he
had met or ever heard of, but realized that he no longer had any
possessions. “No, I don’t think I’ve heard of you. Nice to meet you, Cece.
I’m Mateo.”
“The three amigos!” Brian shouted. “Four!” He pointed at Keilix. “You’re
part of this too. Four, uhh...four musketeers!”
Keilix laughed. “That’s very sweet of you, but my job is here. While people
don’t die as often as they once did, they still do occasionally, and someone
ought to be there to greet them, and facilitate their transition.”
“How did you get this job?” Cecelia asked.
“I just stepped up,” Keilix answered. “Why? Are you interested?”
“I was a guidance counselor on Earth before I became obsolete. So I do have
the experience. Do I have to choose right away, or can I change my mind
later?”
“If you choose to stay here,” Keilix began, “you can always move on later.
But if you choose to move on, I don’t think you can come back. I’ve never
heard of it. I don’t even know who’s in charge over there.”
“Her name is Hogarth Pudeyonavic,” Mateo answered, even though she didn’t
actually ask a question.
Keilix is surprised by this. She looked back down at her clipboard. “How do
you know that?”
“We’re friends,” Mateo explained.
“Interesting. What else do you know?”
“How much time you got?”
“All of it,” Keilix said.
“All of what?” Leona asked as she was walking across Ramses’ secret lab.
“His EmergentSuit nanites,” Ramses answered. “I need them all back. Or
rather he needs them back.”
“He doesn’t have them?” she questioned.
“Boyd must have been injured, however slightly, when Mateo gave him the
suit. It’s not just designed to form a protective barrier. They can also
treat medical conditions, just like any other medical nanites. Some of them
must have stayed with him to conduct repairs, and are still swimming in his
blood.”
“Well, they should be done by now. It’s been hours. So go ahead and take
them,” Leona ordered. “You’re not trying to hold onto them, are you?” she
posed to Boyd.
“I have no mental control over them,” Boyd replied.
“He’s right. Only I can do it. They’re not responding to my commands,
though,” Ramses said to her. “They’re his now. I just need to keep
trying...”
“Well, why do you need them? How does it help Mateo?”
“Each one stores little bits of data from their host,” Ramses began. “If we
want to bring him back, I think I need that intact data. We’re lucky we even
have a chance. If he didn’t have any nanites at all, we would have no way to
anchor him to this point in spacetime.”
“I don’t understand why you can’t find him,” Leona complained to Boyd.
“Isn’t that your thing?”
“Until we get that time power crystal switched off, I don’t have my normal
powers,” Boyd said apologetically.
“We’re almost there!” Olimpia shouted from the other side of the room. She
and the twins were responsible for figuring out how to convert the lemon DNA
into musical chords. Once complete, they will blast the crystal with the
music, and let it play over the course of the next two years, which for
them, will only feel like two days.
Leona sighed. “He could be anywhere, anywhen.”
“I know that,” Ramses agreed. “This is all I can do. The ladies are smart
enough to wire an array of speakers, and my AI finished converting the DNA
last year to musical chords. It’s a bit above my paygrade, to be blunt, so I
need to focus on an alternative way of retrieving Mateo from wherever he
ended up.”
It looked like Mateo was there, lying on the exam table between Leona and
Ramses. But it wasn’t him. It was just his suit; an empty shell waiting for
its host to return. “What if Boyd got back in the suit? Could that...trigger
the stray nanites to return to their brethren?”
“Yeah, I thought about that,” Ramses admitted. “It might work,
or they might all switch to him as their new host, and then
Mateo could be lost forever.”
“I can do it,” Boyd insisted. “You get that crystal turned off, I’ll find
him for us.”
“Forgive me if I have little faith in your motivation to help,” Leona said.
“That’s fair,” Boyd acknowledged, “but I really did learn a lot on the fake
Castlebourne. I have grown. I’m not a saint, but I’m not the same man
you met those years ago.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it. Ram, keep working. Boyd, do whatever he
says. And ladies!” The three of them stopped working, and looked up at their
captain, so she went on, “I need one of you. Romana has an idea, but we need
a third to activate the tandem slingdrives.”
“I’ll go,” Olimpia volunteered.
“I’m sorry, I meant one of the Waltons,” Leona countered.
Olimpia frowned.
“Pia, you have sonic powers. I need you on the music thing. That just makes
sense. If we needed a driver, I would ask Mateo to be a part of it, even if
it’s driving a giant futuristic terraforming tiller piloted by an AI.”
“I’ll go,” Angela said, setting her screwdriver down, allowing her sister to
finish rigging up the speaker apparatus.
Leona and Angela teleported away to meet up with Romana, who was sitting on
the edge of an emerald pool, under a dome fittingly named 10,000 Emerald
Pools. She was staring into the water, obviously aware that they had
arrived, but ignoring them for now. “What do you see in there?” Angela asked
her. “They say the pool reflects your true self back at you.”
Romana, frowning, slapped the water before standing up. “I see an orphan.”
“We’ll get him back,” Leona assured her.
“You can’t promise that.”
“If he died,” Leona started, pausing dramatically, “we’ll get him back from
that too. There is nowhere he could be that we couldn’t find him. Now,
what’s your idea? Where are we going?”
Romana activated her suit, helmet and all. The other two followed her lead.
They took each other’s hands. “We’re going to a new universe, called The
Eighth Choice. I know a Pathfinder there.”
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