How to be Kedar

“We’ve explored the universe; no signs of negative entropy, no alien artifacts: no life. we’re alone. we’re like Gods only we’re bored as hell.”

“What do you do when you’ve done everything there is to do?”
“You could try dying?”

“Why worry about the future? If you’re going to live forever, you might as well live from moment to moment.”

“They say that dying gives you a sense of purpose.”
“By ‘they’ you mean the people who have no choice.”

“We’ve been through deep space, but we still don’t know what’s at the bottom of the ocean. I think that’s how we are, as humans.”

“Do you think, what if life was a big movie and other people were watching?”
“Sometimes,” George replied, although it was more often than just sometimes.

it was a dense question anyway.

“Would you act any differently if you knew?”
“Depends. Do they just see what I see and hear what I hear, or do they know what I’m thinking and feeling all the time?”
“I don’t know. You can’t really control how you think and feel about someone, so it wouldn’t matter,” Anna intimated, hugging her legs.

“Then can you control what you do, and who you are?”

Anna thought about it for a while.

“I don’t know.”

There was a long silence. George and Anna went back to cloud watching.

“Nobody would watch a movie as long and boring as a person’s life anyway,” George returned as a consolation.

“Yeah, who would watch someone piss and shit and stuff. I think God is a real creepo.”

I’m having a lot of trouble with my story. My story takes place in the future, and I’m not sure what the future looks like.

so I did a little research, and here are some ideas that I have:

the first world is a hedonistic paradise where all the richest people live. there are a few choices for where they live:

• orbital space hotels (hotels that orbit the Earth or other planetary bodies)
• terraformed planets – Mars, Venus, the moons of Jupiter
• domed cities like biosphere 2

Everyone has a personal automaton (robot assistant) to perform menial tasks. Medical nanotechnology, as I mentioned before, allows everyone to live forever (so long as they can afford to). My friend who is a biomedical engineer explained other potential technologies – stem cell research, artificial body parts (organic and non-organic).

nanobots interact with sensory implants (possibly?) in order to modify the senses. for instance, ocular modification can recognize people and objects, or create a virtual chatroom.

nanobot applications are mostly open source, but some important nucleotide changes (though mutagenesis or transgenesis?) require admin approval.

there is an anonymous, highly secretive hacker group called “Vitruvius” which attempts to perfect the human body and research potential applications for nanobots in the human brain (which is, at this point in the story, not fully understood). they release patches and updates.

to secure business interests in the other worlds, the first world has perfected combat jackets (made of carbon nanotubes), robotic soldiers and war vehicles and weapons.

in the first world, flying vehicles are common. in residential and urban areas, vehicles are on auto-pilot (to prevent obvious catastrophes). in other areas, such as the wilderness, designated zones, and high sky flight are possible to fly manually. radar display shows closeby aircraft in a topology format; it is possible to holograph this display. when aircraft come dangerously close, manual flight is disabled.

there is a drug called sublife. when taken, this drug manifests a world of your deepest subconsciousness. you live in a world of your deepest hopes and fears. for people who have taken the drug for a while, they have learned to take conscious control of their world, so that the drug trip is like a lucid dream. it is difficult to remember what happened during the trip afterwards, but in dreams and memories the more powerful events come back.

while it is illegal, its easily obtained by the black market. some chemists synthesize the drug in their personal laboratory, and make deals.

the first world is mostly atheistic. if you’re immortal, why would you need God? furthermore, religion is the cause for wars in the third world. there are atheist missionaries, and militant atheists.

there are activists. some people oppose medical nanotechnology all together, believing that it is unnatural. others simply oppose immortality. there are protesters for every major ideology, like anti-atheists and anti-hedonist.

okay. that’s all for now… if you have any ideas about the future, please let me know!

George woke up, screaming under a strobe light. His vision was still blurry, but he was able to make out several strangers clamoring around as if he had just risen from the dead. One of them, no, two, were waving their hands in his face. His eyes felt dead and wet.

“Georgies back!”
“George are you alright? Okay, don’t panic. Nobody has ever died from this. You’re completely safe. We’re your friends, we will take care of you.”

Voices echoes and rang. Most were in laughter. One of them was looking at him and touching him. No, it was just a dream.

“What is this place… am I in heaven?” George stammered and spit, realizing he had a mouth.

Laughter grew and filled an emptiness in his skull. There was a gunshot and a lot of alarmed voices. It pierced through George, but he didn’t feel anything. Blood ran everywhere. The crowd of people ran hysterically. George jumped out of his skin and fell back into a coma. He felt the terror of death. But an angel knelt calmly over George and shed some tears and he was alright again, because he was in heaven.

“Okay George. You’re okay. Stay with me.”

That face that had once been a pinkish blur now had something that looks like eyes.

“You were out for a long time. Longer than most. It’s going to take a while for you to get used to having a body.”

What does that even mean?
George felt his head and his whole face. He felt like he should have a body, seeing as how he had always had one. But now it felt fresh and alive; in an odd sense, real, as if he had never really felt being inside a real, feeling body. This confused George even more.

A cute girl bounced onto him:
“So how is it? What was it like? Did you meet any babes? And what’s heaven, is that where you went?”

George was pretty sure that heaven was supposed to be a special place. He definitely would have remembered if there were any babes.

“Okay, we need to leave George alone now.”
The voices sounded very concerned.

The man and the cute girl were gone. “No, come back,” George thought, or said, he didn’t know which. George felt like he should know these people. Whatever drug he had just taken, it seriously messed with his brains. Why would he take drugs?

All the laughing and the gunshot and the alarmed voices disappeared like a bad ghost. All he heard was silence, sweet silence, and a soft hush in the distance like it was raining tiny metal balls. George was able to sit about, feeling a little dizzy with everything moving around. All the blur settled after a while. He was in someone’s room. White light was spilling everywhere.

That’s precisely when George remembered that he is an immortal.