I watched the clouds for another hour, letting my thoughts pool and coalesce, allowing my emotions to drip feed through my body until they’d run their course.
I practiced the centering exercises my therapist had taught me. I imagined the tree, with strong roots, bending in the wind, but firmly anchored and unbreaking.
I tapped my shoulders rhythmically with my arms crossed, and built my safe space back up in my head, focusing on the small details of it, of the imaginary sensations that I found most comforting.
All that stupid shit that, unfortunately for us all, actually works.
And then, finally, I started to feel normal again.
So, what the fuck just happened to me?
Was I actually in some incredibly detailed simulation, or was I having a fever dream brought about by one of the drugs I’d been told to ingest prior to my appointment?
Was the machine that was scanning me causing this, somehow?
Would I simply wake, given time?
Maybe. But there was no point in betting on it.
I’d sat here for long enough, and it was time to see what was next.
I picked the tablet back up from where I’d discarded it, and pressed the flashing green button in the corner.
I really should’ve guessed that doing so would just lead to more excruciatingly slow tutorialization.
After being walked through some more shit at the pace of a bedbound snail, I finally got some useful information.
I was, according to the grey, blandly smiling pictogram on the screen, an artificial intelligence created from an ancient scan of an actual person’s consciousness. A person who was long dead.
If this source was to be believed, the person I had thought of as being me was actually an entirely separate entity, one who’d gone on to live for a number of years after the date of their (my?) brain scan.
I was a digital clone, essentially. One based upon an out of date blueprint.
Strangely, I found myself believing that explanation far more easily than you might expect.
It explained the absurdity of my current circumstances quite handily, especially given what was said to me next.
You see, I hadn’t been so painfully constructed for simple shits and giggles. No, I was here to serve out the sentence of my biological predecessor, who had apparently committed an exhaustive list of crimes for which they’d never been made to pay for.
Though I didn’t really think of anything I’d done in life as a ‘crime’ per say. Mostly because I didn’t believe in laws or criminal punishment. Both concepts felt entirely farcical to me for a number of reasons.
But the rest of the world had never really agreed with me on that point.
And that apparently hadn’t changed, even when I’d gone on to commit several major acts of terrorsism after that brain scan.
I didn’t have all the details, but I could only assume that I’d been given yet more confirmation that I would soon perish, and that I’d subsequently decided to make the most of what little time I had left.
And by making the most of my time, I meant bombing a bunch of police stations and assassinating several high profile politicians.
As I was read aloud my rap sheet, I mostly just spent the whole time smiling and nodding, silently congratulating past me for having gotten so much done before she’d kicked the bucket.
Finding out that I’d somehow not only killed the standing president, but also murdered his vice president (and then worked my way down the list all the way to the treasurer), was by far the highlight of my day.
Though I also took no small amount of cruel delight in the fact that I’d roasted a great many pigs.
Shame I couldn’t remember doing any of it.
I’d been idly fantasizing about doing that shit for years, only to apparently be denied the firsthand experience committing the acts in question.
It was a real nasty case of murder-blueballs. Murder cucking? Both? Neither?
Now, where was I?
Right, the dumbass corporate AI who’d been assigned to be my new personal assistant was explaining to me that I was essentially a fuckingindentured servant, now.
One owned by a giant ass megacorp, it looked like. They’d bought my contract from the government as part of a regular arrangement, where weapons and slave labor were produced by the state, and sold to a few different companies to use in place of an actual state run military.
And lucky me, when it came to slaves and weapons, I counted as both at the same time. Significantly less than a person, slightly more than a perfectly inert tool.
I couldn’t even pretend to be surprised. I was a trans person who’d grown up under an ever increasingly conservative authoritarian government. I was used to being demeaned as lesser.
This just felt like more of the same.
Regardless, my criminally mandated orders were to colonize a recently discovered alien planet full of (reportedly) hyper aggressive mega fauna.
They’d actually sent people there before me, but they hadn’t fared particularly well. All they really accomplished, apparently, was discovering alien life for the first time, and then getting murdered by said alien life.
Thus why they were sending me, as well as a whole bunch of other contractees (read: more dead criminals converted into true artificial intelligences) to that planet and several other identically infested planets nearby.
Because it was looking an awful lot like the answer to the Fermi paradox was that there was another (Allegedly) xenophobic space travelling species that had beat us to the punch at intergalactic colonization and genocide.
Real shame, that.
The poor, poor, hyper rich capitalist scum that claimed to own me must be pulling their collective hair out over the thought that somebody else had managed to commit so many of their evils before they could ever get the chance.
“Cry me a fucking river, you fucking vampires.” I hissed, as I was exposited at with a bland, tone deaf, and absolutely moronic level of professional brightness.
At least now I knew who I had to kill.
Not these aliens, that was for sure.
My only source of information on them was questionable at best, and I wouldn’t have been comfortable acting as the long arm of capitalist imperialism even in the unlikely event they were all unthinking monsters.
No. The fascist pigs had made the mistake of bringing me back, and I was going to be sure that they paid for it.
The fact that they’d literally misgendered me was only the icing on the hatred filled cake, now.
Unfortunately for me, however, I was already on a one way trip to my assigned planet.
The vessel my digitized consciousness was housed in had expended all of its fuel long ago, and I couldn’t alter its trajectory.
While I’d initially received my sentence inside of a computer on earth, I’d afterwards been deactivated until about an hour ago.
Wait, an hour?
I’d been up and about for way longer than that!
A question directed at my ‘helper’ AI revealed that I now perceived time at a rate that was roughly four times faster than that of a flesh and blood human, by default.
I could theoretically even increase my rate of perception further, depending on available computational resources.
Or, alternatively, I could slow my perception way down, in order to essentially put my life on fast forward. Which didn’t seem all that useful until I realized that I had five years in real time until I hit landfall. That was fifteen subjective years stuck in a nice little box, all alone, with little to do.
I’d been locked out of basically all of the systems packaged into my ship, and that would remain the case until I landed.
They really didn’t want me getting up to any trouble before I got to my destination.
Which I was forced to admit was a good move, on their part. I would have totally used the onboard fabricator to engineer a way out of my current situation otherwise.
Or just put my computerized brain in a brick and hurled it back towards earth as yet another middle finger to the system at large.
Regardless, for the moment I was trapped, and with nothing to do but read up on what information was available to me, fiddle with the simulation that was now my home, or just fast forward through time until I landed.
Given that knowledge was power, I chose to study.
It helped that I was incentivised to do so by my helper AI. Apparently for every thing that I demonstrated understanding of, I’d be rewarded with additional resources later.
And there was a large library of data to pour through, though I’d have to ‘read’ it manually. As it turned out, emulated consciousness like me did not adapt well to just having information dumped into them wholesale. Every attempt to do so had rapidly led to psychosis and memory degradation on everyone they’d tried it on.
That being said, so long as I absorbed the info the ‘right’ way, I still had a theoretically infinite and near perfect memory, now.
Even better, they’d partially cured my ADHD by giving me an effectively infinite amount of executive function, as part and parcel of my conversion to an AI.
So that was neat.
I probably still had the same amount of autism, though.
The first thing I read up on was history.
Even if my source was obviously questionable, knowing the ruling power’s narrative of events would still be helpful.
Plus, that was what I’d minored in back in college, so I’d be starting off relatively easy.
The history textbooks that I had access to all started by outlining a vague dark period that humanity went through shortly after I was scanned.
What happened there was intentionally left unclear, but supposedly there were a lot of foolish people upturning the ‘natural’ social order.
Reading between the lines, my guess was that there was actually some sort of international people’s uprising that was far more successful than the current powers would like anyone to know.
After that was some drivel regarding some chosen few who knew the real ‘truths’ of the world, who shepherded humanity back onto the right and just path of hyper-capitalism, the revolution supposedly nothing but a small diversion along the destined path of all humankind.
Which was delivered to me with the sort of absolute certainty that implied that the reality had been anything but.
In my experience, propaganda was only that blunt and simplistic when those in charge were really working against the available evidence.
That meant my fellow commies/socialist/slightly less evil people were probably still thriving somewhere or another.
After each unit in the textbooks, there was a recommended quiz. Given they were technically optional, I would normally skip them, but sadly, I needed to pass them to get those bonus resources.
At least they didn’t just test my ability to memorize information. My perfect memory would have made that pointless. So instead they gave me a bunch of essay questions, which I blitzed through with ease.
At which point my Helper AI/Jailor/Overdesigned Chatbot graded me on it.
And it was then that I found out that the single biggest determinant of my score was not my ability to synthesise information and form opinions, but whether or not I demonstrated my ability to regurgitate propaganda.
Because of course it was.
All the ‘tests’ and their promised rewards were just bait for getting me to swallow and puke back up a bunch of state mandated bullshit.
I continued my reading regardless, going onto the units that covered mankind’s spread to the stars and subsequent colonization of other relatively close biospheres over the course of the next 150 years.
After which humans finally cracked faster than light travel, and then subsequently stumbled across an intergalactic alien swarm that was both oddly homogenous and hyperadaptable.
The Fermi paradox solved, and a very big problem gained in trade.
A force that supposedly could not be communicated, reasoned, or negotiated with. And that killed any other species on sight.
I’d be the judge of that myself, I expected, but that was for future me to worry about.
For now, I needed to keep reading before I had an existential crisis regarding the nature of my very being.
Though oddly, after only a half a year’s worth of time spent, I was already out of history to read. And sociology. And philosophy. And… Basically every version of liberal arts or the ‘softer’ sciences, excepting a library of Alexandria's worth of business management and marketing texts.
Which figured, really. They were called liberal arts for a reason. Education has an inherently liberal bias, so why educate anybody more than you had to in order to produce more stem scientists and loyal profiteers?
As a result, I was left with nothing left to learn but marketing, business bullshit, general science, engineering, or fuckingprogramming. Frankly speaking, I would rather die than try and learn from these absolute fucks how to be a better capitalist, so that was right out. Meanwhile programming, while admittedly infinitely more useful, had long been my nemesis.
So learning the entirety that I could of the general sciences and engineering seemed like my best bet.
Well… At least it would keep me occupied.
That process took about two years in real time, and eight in subjective time.
That was a long enough period to theoretically earn a doctorate, granted, but that was still an absurd rate of progress considering how much I’d absorbed.
So many centuries of human knowledge, condensed into the amount of time that it generally takes for an infant to start learning to walk.
Though it should be acknowledged that I was only able to learn so quickly because of several new advantages that came with being an AI.
Namely, that I never had to sleep or rest.
Not only did I never get tired, I also never got bored, so long as I had something to do. I never got mentally fatigued, either, outside of bouts of extreme emotion.
Something which I didn’t allow myself to have. Mostly because I was worried that I’d go insane if I allowed myself even a moment of time to think.
…
Anyway! Future tech was cool!
Humans had figured out how to harness stable nuclear fusion to create massive amounts of superheated plasma, and had also figured out how to make electro magnets powerful and precise enough to contain and harness that energy.
Which was still, oddly enough, primarily done by boiling water and then using the resulting steam to spin turbines, which turned rotational movement into electricity via passing magnets around coils of copper wire, just as humans had been doing since the nineteenth century.
Earlier, if you omitted the electrical generation part and were willing to count steam engines.
We somehow had yet to figure out how to really shortcut that process efficiently, despite much research into piezo electric currents and widening the array of energy that could be captured via devices similar to solar panels.
Wait… We? Did I even count as human anymore?
Oh dear god.
Nope, not thinking about that. Back to the books. And the stupid tests, while I was at it.
Oh, we also had lightsaber tech, now. Weaponizing jets of plasma was one of the first things we did, after figuring out stable power generation.
As a long ranged weapon, lasers were generally better, but for a ten meter long torch of instant destruction, or a controlled explosive, fusion generated plasma was great.
Alternatively, you could use a fusion based explosive to generate a rapidly expanding cloud of gas inside of an electromagnetically reinforced barrel, allowing you to propel a bullet faster and farther than ever before.
Or, instead, you could create a rocket engine that just used plasma to superheat plain old water for reaction mass. Y’know, for better Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles!
Or, if you really insist, you could use those rocket engines for space travel. But only if you were going to mine asteroids for precious metals!
None of that ‘exploration’ or ‘bettering humanity’ nonsense! After all, anything that could be remotely perceived as virtuous will one day stand in the way of humanity’s one true purpose, accumulating ever increasing amounts of wealth for the benefit of the chosen few!
And don’t let any dirty commies like me tell you otherwise!
Anyway, fusion drives like that were the main way people got around for a while.
Then we got really good at putting immense amounts of energy into a very small space, all in the name of making ever better explosives. Until, one day, we made a bomb so potent that we tore a hole in the fabric of reality itself.
FTL travel unlocked, all as a side effect of trying to miniaturize nukes that could kill entire planets to the size of a football.
All praise the glorious military industrial complex!
It will surely not be the death of us all!!
LONG LIVE CAPATALISM!!!