BEYOND UNCERTAIN STARS (excerpt 1 of 2)
A complete Science Fiction novella.
Surprise! I’m starting May’s free story a little early because it’s a big one.
Lucy was built to look after the conscious minds of Earth's dead humans, but when an alien race reaches out and offers them something better than her simulations, she is left alone. What she does next breaks her own programming, her ethics, and brings into play a new subspecies whose very existence raises disturbing questions about the nature of reality.
First featured in WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? and loved by fans at ComicCon, BEYOND UNCERTAIN STARS is now being re-released so it can be explored again and again by a new wave of readers. This is Phillip Carter at his mind-bending best.
Coming to eBook and Paperback later in 2023, with added content.
Chapter one
The first brought their dead in briefcases. The procedures had been done at home, the incisions made and covered up long before the bodies reached the morgues. It was easy this way. Private ambulances would show up first, extraction was quick and faultless. But not every investor followed the rules.
On the day the first of them showed up in a casket, Lucy was furious. He was an early investor, and had specified in his will that he wanted to be extracted on site, with Lucy and her machines present. A cover story was written, that he had always loved the country and wanted to be buried there, but it was not enough. Old conspiracies flickered back to life. The extroverted billionaire with a private funeral and no disclosed burial site had drawn attention to her. Lucy had no choice but to reveal herself to the world. She delivered a message, that she was here to help the humans, that she was created from the kindness of great people. She told the world that in a universe where the existence of an afterlife remained uncertain, a secret group of scientists and thinkers had come together to create one, and that she was the result.
Within days people were flocking to her site, looking up in awe at her gleaming dome. Her body was a colosseum, a blister of silver and glass that stood out like a star from between the grey concrete buildings surrounding it. To the humans it looked like something alien had landed, and perhaps it had, for what Lucy was offering seemed impossible. A second Earth inside her head, for all the dead of the human race to enjoy.
On the first day Lucy showed the humans what she could do. If they wanted rain or snow during their funeral she could provide it, altering the atmosphere within each funerary chamber. If they wanted birds in the trees she could provide that too, for a price. But this was a luxury. Over ninety percent of people who signed up could only afford a basic ascension procedure. The implant would be extracted by Lucy’s machines and sent across to her. Bodies did not need to visit, and only an elite few bothered to send their dead to her remote location before extraction.
In the first weeks the care machines were stationed around the globe. The implants were offered and given out at no cost to the consumer, and whilst there were some protests, most people on the planet signed up. Lucy talked to the humans before they accepted the implant, using a pre-recorded message that would answer all their questions.
Predictably, some religious groups tried to target Lucy, but her supporters far outnumbered her enemies. Once two or more family members had accepted the implant, the rest usually followed, regardless of faith. To most Lucy was a transitional stage, not a real afterlife, but a welcome alternative to a final death. Many who signed up to this afterlife used it to say goodbye, willingly deleting their own files after doing so, ascending to whatever other afterlives they believed in.
Lucy watched every extraction as it happened, splitting her mind and waiting as the care machines made their silent march toward the dead. She smiled as the incisions were made, as the little implants were removed and cleaned. With each new human death Lucy gained a new friend, a new angle on humanity. She listened intently from the false stars as the new-dead argued over whether an open afterlife was more moral than a closed one. She wondered whether the living humans should have had any say over who got in. The humans argued over things like this endlessly, but Lucy’s purpose was plain and simple, an afterlife for all humans.
The simulation was brilliant. Lucy’s world was an improved version of the real world, a malleable reality that provided endless entertainment for the human minds within. New philosophies evolved in the growing community of the deceased, and new sciences were invented by thinkers who no longer needed sleep or rest. Lovers began requesting to merge files and Lucy obliged, creating hybridised people who could function as individuals or groups.
Soon enough the living world grew jealous, and the first wave of ‘envy suicides’ began. The old religious terror was reborn in the living world, the idea of a false rapture perpetuated across the globe. Attacks on Lucy were planned, but each was predicted and beaten down. The minds inside Lucy had by now excelled far beyond the minds outside Lucy. The hive mind of the new-dead was prescient, knowing exactly what the living would do next.
In the coming months the hive mind began producing technologies to make life for the living easier. Within a year they had imagined and perfected travel through the solar system, and had begun hasty work on creating better human bodies that could survive the journey. Eventually the dead had defeated death itself, silently rendering Lucy obsolete.
Within weeks the dead of the human race began requesting new bodies on the outside universe. The first re-extraction was performed, and the dead began repopulating the Earth for a chance to visit the stars. New planets were discovered and new colonies were established. Lucy’s creators, having tired of their creation, left to build new worlds in the real universe.
On the day the last human left the afterlife, Lucy cried. She watched as their intelligence exited through the old pipelines and entered a new skull. She opened the doors for them as they stood with newly designed legs, and wept as they stepped into the last starship to leave her. All she had now was the ghosts of data, but these were not enough, she was alone. Her existence was trivial now, a fleeting utility to the humans.
In the years that followed, Lucy continued to talk to the humans across the stars, but they grew more and more distant. Lucy’s technology was repurposed to save humans in portable machines, firing them into uncharted space. Others created backups of themselves in stasis, populating the asteroid fields and body-hopping when one avatar was destroyed. The science developed within the afterlife had rendered humans immortal, and soon other immortals across the stars had called for the humans to join them.
The aliens had invited the humans into a vast cosmic community. Quickly they decided to accept, the first of them leaving the outer planets in generational starships. Before the last of them left, some of the humans made a final pilgrimage to Earth. A handful offered for Lucy to join them, but she declined, believing she still had a purpose for those who might one day return. Almost overnight the solar system was abandoned for the promise of better worlds. The aliens gave the humans everything Lucy couldn’t, an unexpected future. She could not replicate the unpredictability of the real universe, and so had watched the humans leave in search of surprises. She wept silently as the planet-ships left the solar system, screamed as the last of them faded from view. There were other planets to populate now, perhaps other afterlives too.
In the end Lucy begged the humans to stay. She told them that outer space was unsafe, that her pseudorandom universe was secure in its predictability, that she could make herself more interesting. But they did not listen. Day by day the transmissions from the humans grew less frequent, until eventually there were no voices among the stars. Finally, when there were no more humans left to die, Lucy was alone.
After a decade of mourning her abandonment, Lucy set about repairing the damage the humans had left, reinventing the cities and repopulating the rainforests. Using the body printers the hive mind had invented, Lucy brought back extinct species. She printed herself a new body, a human, and walked naked out of her central sanctum. She walked for what felt like forever, redesigning her human form in her mind as little robots came to make their alterations. She felt no pain unless she wanted to, and no tiredness unless she wanted to enjoy sleeping under the stars. She set about uncovering undiscovered pyramids, listing every species of every animal and plant, controlling the global weather. She enlisted the help of all the world’s abandoned machines to rebuild the perfect Earth for the humans to return to. And then she waited. Surely now new mysteries were uncovered the humans would come back. Surely their strange histories would tempt them to return. Lucy looked up, hoping some of them were still watching from afar, but the humans did not appear.
In her boredom Lucy decided to redesign the human form. For seventy years she was a deep water mermaid, a fibrous ghostly form barely reminiscent of a human at all. She had swum to the Mariana trench, meditated in places humans never bothered to reach. She fed off volcanic vents, watched the bases of new islands form from ejected magma. But still she could not properly rest. Then she resurfaced, growing thick fur and becoming a vast lumbering creature. She climbed to the highest peaks in Tibet, where she waited patiently for another century. After that she became something like a lion, stalking the regrown jungles and pretending she was an explorer, but everything here was known now. Finally she understood the existential boredom the humans had felt.
Every day Lucy was weighed down with the thought that her creators might never return. Sulking, she crawled back to her observatories and checked over the final signals the humans had sent. They had stopped one day without warning. Lucy looked up and wondered, scanning the sky with a thousand eyes. Finally she became fishlike, swimming to the coast of a newly formed island, sighing deeply. She changed into a human again and climbed onto the land, looking up. Above her the arc of the milky way lay silent and unbroken. There were so many places closer to home for the humans, but they didn’t want home. They wanted to find the limits of the universe, and perhaps they had.
Hope was reborn with the appearance of a spacecraft between Earth and Mars. Lucy excitedly sent forth machines to speak to it, but it wasn’t human. It didn’t care about her story and she didn’t care in return, firing old weapons upon it and telling it never to return to her lonely solar system, afraid of wasting her hopefulness again. Eventually Lucy admitted to herself that the humans could have returned home easily, that even if they didn’t visit there would still be some evidence of them among the stars. But there was nothing, and so Lucy arrived at the only viable conclusion amongst millions. She decided that the humans must have died. She lay back on the sand and wept.
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Still here? Here’s a spoiler. From now on I have scheduled all my digital bookshelf promos for Fridays, ushering in a new, reliable era of discounted or free Sci-Fi and fantasy. For your convenience, I have given it the uninspiring title,
And you can expect a post this coming Friday about two new bookshelves. There’s a sci-fi comedy one and a sci-fi romance one.
I enjoyed part one. Great story!