Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

There weren’t a million people on the Mall this time. There weren’t even a hundred thousand. And the mood wasn’t jubilant; rather, a melancholy cloud hung over everyone.

But it was the best answer. Everyone could see that. The Olduvai’s lander had been refurbished, and crews from Earth’s orbiting space stations had visited the mothership, upgrading and refurbishing it, as well.

Captain Plato looked despondent; Johnstone and the several others of the twenty-five who had now publicly contravened acceptable standards of behavior looked embarrassed and contrite.

Hauptmann and Chin had no trouble getting to the front of the crowd this time. They already knew what Plato was going to say, having discussed it with him on the way over. And so they watched the faces in the crowd—still a huge number of people, but seeming positively post-Apocalyptic in comparison to the throng of a few days before.

“People of the Earth,” said Plato, addressing his physical and virtual audiences. “We knew we’d come back to a world much changed, an Earth centuries older than the one we’d left behind. We’d hoped—and those of us who pray had prayed—that it would be a better place. And, in many ways, it clearly is.

“We’ll find a new home,” Plato continued. “Of that I’m sure. And we’ll build a new society—one, we hope, that might be as peaceful and efficient as yours. We—all twenty-five of us—have already agreed on one thing that should get us off on the right foot.” He looked at the men and women of his crew, then turned and faced the people of the Free Earth for the last time. “When we find a new world to settle, we won’t be planting any flags in its soil.”

Kata Bindu

Many years ago, with great trepidation, I approached Gregory Benford, the king of hard SF, and asked him to read my novel Starplex, and, if he liked it, to offer a blurb for the cover. Fie did so: “Starplex is complex but swift, inventive but real-feeling, with ideas coming thick and fast; for big time interstellar adventure, look no farther.”

That was flattering enough, but the best was yet to come: Greg remembered me and, in 2001, when he was putting together an anthology of stories about microcosms, he asked me to contribute. This story is the result of that invitation.

* * *

We sometimes contemplated giving ourselves a name. “Those Who Had Been Flesh” appealed to us. So did “The Collective Consciousness of Earth.” And “The Uploaded.”

But, to our infinite sadness, there was no need for a name—for there was no one to speak with, no one to proffer an introduction to, no possible confusion about the referents of pronouns. Despite centuries now of scanning the sky for alien radio signals, we’d found nothing.

Because of that, we’d never even had to resolve the question of whether we should refer to ourselves in the singular or the plural. Granted, we had once been ten billion individuals; plurals were no doubt appropriate then. But after almost all members of Homo sapiens had taken The Next Step, we had surrendered that individuality, slowly at first, then with abandon—for who would not want to take into themselves the genius of the world’s greatest mathematicians, the wit of the cleverest comedians, the virtue of the most altruistic humanitarians, the talent of the most gifted composers, and the tranquility of the most serene contemplatives?

Ah, but it turned out there were some who did not want this. Mennonites were long gone; Luddites were likewise a thing of the past. But there was one last group left, in Africa, that still lived by traditional means. They did not want to take The Next Step—and so we instead gave them that famous giant leap: we moved them all to the Moon.

What else could we have done? Although we had been about to become something more than human, we were, and are, still humane: we certainly weren’t going to just eliminate them. But we couldn’t leave anyone here on Earth, for once we’d uploaded our consciousnesses, once we had merged into the global web, a fanatic could disable the computers, could destroy our helpless, noncorporeal selves.