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--
======== PROLOGUE ========
I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the
Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to
realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see
the death of the workplace and of work.
I never thought I'd live to see the day when Keep A-Movin' Dan would
decide to deadhead until the heat death of the Universe.
Dan was in his second or third blush of youth when I first met him,
sometime late-XXI. He was a rangy cowpoke, apparent 25 or so, all
rawhide squint-lines and sunburned neck, boots worn thin and infinitely
comfortable. I was in the middle of my Chem thesis, my fourth Doctorate,
and he was taking a break from Saving the World, chilling on campus in
Toronto and core-dumping for some poor Anthro major. We hooked up at the
Grad Students' Union -- the GSU, or Gazoo for those who knew -- on a
busy Friday night, spring-ish. I was fighting a coral-slow battle for a
stool at the scratched bar, inching my way closer every time the press
of bodies shifted, and he had one of the few seats, surrounded by a
litter of cigarette junk and empties, clearly encamped.
Some duration into my foray, he cocked his head at me and raised a sun-
bleached eyebrow. "You get any closer, son, and we're going to have to
get a pre-nup."
I was apparent forty or so, and I thought about bridling at being called
son, but I looked into his eyes and decided that he had enough realtime
that he could call me son anytime he wanted. I backed off a little and
apologized.
He struck a cig and blew a pungent, strong plume over the bartender's
head. "Don't worry about it. I'm probably a little over accustomed to
personal space."
I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard anyone on-world talk about
personal space. With the mortality rate at zero and the birth-rate at
non-zero, the world was inexorably accreting a dense carpet of people,
even with the migratory and deadhead drains on the population. "You've
been jaunting?" I asked -- his eyes were too sharp for him to have
missed an instant's experience to deadheading.
He chuckled. "No sir, not me. I'm into the kind of macho shitheadery
that you only come across on-world. Jaunting's for play; I need work."
The bar-glass tinkled a counterpoint.
I took a moment to conjure a HUD with his Whuffie score on it. I had to
resize the window -- he had too many zeroes to fit on my standard
display. I tried to act cool, but he caught the upwards flick of my eyes
and then their involuntary widening. He tried a little aw-shucksery,
gave it up and let a prideful grin show.
"I try not to pay it much mind. Some people, they get overly grateful."
He must've seen my eyes flick up again, to pull his Whuffie history.
"Wait, don't go doing that -- I'll tell you about it, you really got to
know.
"Damn, you know, it's so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks.
You'd think you'd really miss 'em, but you don't."
And it clicked for me. He was a missionary -- one of those fringe-
dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the benighted
corners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die,
starve, and choke on petrochem waste. It's amazing that these
communities survive more than a generation; in the Bitchun Society
proper, we usually outlive our detractors. The missionaries don't have
such a high success rate -- you have to be awfully convincing to get
through to a culture that's already successfully resisted nearly a
century's worth of propaganda -- but when you convert a whole village,
you accrue all the Whuffie they have to give. More often, missionaries
end up getting refreshed from a backup after they aren't heard from for
a decade or so. I'd never met one in the flesh before.
"How many successful missions have you had?" I asked.
"Figured it out, huh? I've just come off my fifth in twenty years --
counterrevolutionaries hidden out in the old Cheyenne Mountain NORAD
site, still there a generation later." He sandpapered his whiskers with
his fingertips. "Their parents went to ground after their life's savings
vanished, and they had no use for tech any more advanced than a rifle.
Plenty of those, though."
He spun a fascinating yarn then, how he slowly gained the acceptance of
the mountain-dwellers, and then their trust, and then betrayed it in
subtle, beneficent ways: introducing Free Energy to their greenhouses,
then a gengineered crop or two, then curing a couple deaths, slowly
inching them toward the Bitchun Society, until they couldn't remember
why they hadn't wanted to be a part of it from the start. Now they were
mostly off-world, exploring toy frontiers with unlimited energy and
unlimited supplies and deadheading through the dull times en route.
"I guess it'd be too much of a shock for them to stay on-world. They
think of us as the enemy, you know -- they had all kinds of plans drawn
up for when we invaded them and took them away; hollow suicide teeth,
booby-traps, fall-back-and-rendezvous points for the survivors. They
just can't get over hating us, even though we don't even know they
exist. Off-world, they can pretend that they're still living rough and
hard." He rubbed his chin again, his hard calluses grating over his
whiskers. "But for me, the real rough life is right here, on-world. The
little enclaves, each one is like an alternate history of humanity --
what if we'd taken the Free Energy, but not deadheading? What if we'd
taken deadheading, but only for the critically ill, not for people who
didn't want to be bored on long bus-rides? Or no hyperlinks, no
adhocracy, no Whuffie? Each one is different and wonderful."
I have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and I found myself
saying, "Wonderful? Oh sure, nothing finer than, oh, let's see, dying,
starving, freezing, broiling, killing, cruelty and ignorance and pain
and misery. I know I sure miss it."