Lemuria

Katka Chi woke up and unstrapped herself. She hated sleeping in zero-g. Like most people, she enjoyed the luxury of tossing and turning. She looked in the mirror and examined the pattern of loops and arrows tattooed on her neck and under her chin. She had begun customizing this body. Hopefully, she would have time to enjoy it for a while before packing her consciousness into the cybernetic lattice of a magnetic crystal.

“Baby, when am I gonna get laid?” She remarked into the air as she cleaned her teeth with the electrovibrolo.

“That is contingent upon your own behavior, Kat.” the soft voice of the computer resonated from a speaker above her head.

“C’mon baby. We’re friends. You have access to information I don’t.” Kat remarked offhandedly as she brushed her teeth.

“Other people are asking that question and mentioning your name.”

The breach of confidentiality shocked Kat momentarily. Intelligent computers tended to bond very strongly with particular operators. Advances in artificial intelligence had only intensified this quirk, creating minds that reflected the idiosyncratic preferences of their designers. “Thanks, Baby, you know exactly what to say sometimes.” It was true, for the first time, Kat felt attractive in her new body.

It was an irrefutable feature of human psychology that, under some circumstances, a person needed to feel beautiful, loved, admired. This was one of the most difficult psychological needs to provide for, since long-term friends and lovers often took each other for granted. Kat’s modifications of her own body were a personal attempt to reclaim the feeling of identity-a personal admiration of beauty.

A soft blue light flashed to the right of the mirror. It was Helga calling. That was Helga’s color. “Let her though Baby, she can see me with bed-head.”

“Good morning Kat, what’s this I hear about gravity waves?........Nice work. Brings me back to the original Helga.” Floating naked in zero-g, Kat remembered the computer’s remark and decided to give Helga a good, long look.

Helga had seen strange times. The two had been friends since Kat was a student. The remark reminded Kat of just how old the commander really was. On their first mission together, Helga had related her experiences as a twenty-ninth century neotribalist, and their struggle against television society. As a university student, she was among the first to disobey the social order of her century by turning off state-mandated television programming, embracing ancient ideas, and decorating their bodies with elaborate mutilations. At a time when young people were forbidden to leave their homes, she and others revived the old customs, gathering in public squares and malls, taking synthivax and parachrome to induce states of introspection and euphoria, and questioning the philosophical underpinnings of a society devoid of noncommercial social interaction. A linguist and philosopher, Helga experimented with the ultimate mind-altering experience, being among the first to have her mind transferred into the new generation of synthetic bodies. A few years later, she was one of a handful of quasihumans that escaped to Titan when it became against the law to speak out against the theological science that prevailed in the wake their rebellion. The oldest quasihuman Kat knew, she secretly idolized Helga. Usually, egoic drift begins to affect a person after the second or third body.

Egoic drift. The gradual loss of that je ne sais pas ce que c’est that makes a person enjoy life as a human, was a secret worry for both Helga and Kat. The transfer of a mind from one synthetic body did not confer immortality. Instead, it offered a different type of inevitable decline.

“Alright boss” Kat answered, pulling on a black jumpsuit. “Baby has been detecting rapid pulses of what seems to be gravitational attraction from the neighborhood of that second gas giant. They act on our own mass as well. It was just difficult to sort it out from the relativistic effects of deceleration. Tat speculated they have some means of altering the Higgs’ field locally.”

“Why?”

“Take a guess; levitating mountains, turning back time, punching holes into other universes.”

“Christ, what have we gotten ourselves into?” Helga was both awed and nonplussed. The Higgs field was a fundamental attribute of the space time continuum. Nothing in terrestrial anthropology or psychology prepared her to deal with a culture in possession of so much power.

“Admit it, this supports your contention that the oldest civilizations outgrow notion of building a galactic empire-even if a galactic empire were possible.”

“Still, Kat, how do we deal with this one?”

“If we really are like bugs to them, maybe they’ll ignore us and let us snap some pictures.”

“We didn’t come here to hide.” Helga remarked. “An unmanned probe would have done that better. I say we go right up and knock on the door.”