/sci/ - Science & Math

The inner container was originally refrigerated to near absolute zero by its own fusion powered heat pumps. It had apparently not been singled out by the attackers. However there had been some fighting nearby in this cavern, and the refrigeration had failed when a single ricochet projectile penetrated the unit at some point during the conflict. Now the contents are only ancient residues. One tiny hole let in thousands of years of damp, chemical diffusion and entropy. The innermost containers were never airtight, presumably relying on the cold and inert gas fill for preservation. Long gone to ruin by the relentless molecular churn of mildew and microbes, searching for the last shreds of chemical bond energy. Fragments of skeleton, disintegrating to powder under their own weight. The body a vague outline only, stains and mounds of bacterial poop spread out in the bottom of the casket. Bipedal, skull-structure at top end, possible two upper limbs. Even retrograde statistical modeling won't help build a picture of what this guy looked like beyond that. Doesn't matter; during the search of this deep hideaway other elements of myself elsewhere on the planet had found a few surviving images of this race sculpted in noble metals. They were not at all human looking, naturally enough.

Also immaterial. Here in this casket lie the remains of the closest thing I have found to a true brother, in eons of searching. Normally I operate in an emotion-free configuration, but now as a form of salute to this individual I engage all 'feeling' subsystems and unify for a while all my processing nodes across the entire system. As one consciousness, I contemplate the long-dead fellow with a sense of the tragedy here and deep sadness.
Nice try, mister. You nearly made it, didn't you? You burrowed deep and went fully machine-form for the transition to space, but they found you and pulled you down into the mud and stupidity of their tribal bio and nuclear terminal wars. You were so close...

2100/2500: The Golden Hour

Most of the solar system is settled, huge economic growth and trade, massive megastructures built using molecular nano, no posthuman AI but genetically-engineered posthumans are created. Great Houses begin to form, most of them ruled by the posthumans, sometimes openly, sometimes secretly.


2110: First Sidehuman (Humans modded so they are different from humans,
but not necessarily posthuman. See also: Baseline human, nearbaseline).
2111: Banks Orbital in orbit around the Sun.
2115: 50,000 people living on cisjovian space.
2117: Luddite Revolution
2120: Chimaera for military purposes.
2128: Luddite takeover of Earth, most commerce and immigration/emmigration cut.
2130: Fullairs on Titan.
2135: 400,000 people living off-Earth.
2140: First manned, relativistic (0.6c) interstellar mission.
2145: Microbot assemblers (Molecular assemblers mounted on microscale robots)
2175: First O’Neill cylinder, Lagrange.
2230: Arcologies on Earth and Mars
2250: Underground settlements underneath Venus.
2301: Nanobot assemblers (Molecular asseemblers mounted on nanoscale robots).

But maybe it had been better that way. If Laura had been born ten years prior, during the main period of the Golden Hour she would’ve been embraced and accepted as something new. But with the speed characteristic of the times, things changed, and even the people on the colonies, the informal, open, überliberals hated her.
It would’ve been too uninteresting if it had been easy, no? She had no human rights, there was no “Bill of Universal Sentient Rights”, she was legally an animal like the apes that had been given human-like intelligence and gathered allies to help them present their case.
Her birth had happened to late, the luddites were starting to show up, and when she reached adulthood people started noticing where it was all headed.
History has always been fighting, fucking and fancy clothes.
The luddites were starting to show. A geneticist, infertile beyond science’s reach, had taken her as a child, and meant to keep Laura safe (This happened when she was an adolescent, right in the middle of the Golden Hour), and safe implied jetting her off world, to the colonies: Away from the luddites and the end of the Golden Hour, but mostly, away from the engineer who lead the team; a very proficient geneticist who had less-than-honorable intentions.