They had made their way to a caffeteria, or at least it looked like one. Joe spent some time at a machine set up where, if it were a cafeteria like I remembered, there would be serving people doling out food onto platters.

Joe cursed a few times before a mechanical whirr began, followed by the sound of something viscuous spitting out into a bowl. Joe collected three of them before returning to the table.

“There we go, eat up, I know it doesent look appetizing, but your body needs the nutrients.”

It looks like a quivering pile of off white... jelly? Sour cream? It had a bit of a grainy texture. There was a spork in the bowl and I used it to shovel a bite of it into my mouth.

It was grainy and mealy with a slightly tang taste, but I swallowed it and immediately began wolfing down the rest of the bowl.

Iron-Bait, god that was a weird name, pecked at her food. “Not hungry?” I asked

“She's just used to having a full food simulation going when having to eat. This tub is too old to have a total noosphere to link up to. This is probably the first time she's been without at least augmented reality since she can remember.”

“That's not true!” Iron-bait said petulantly. Though due to their augmentations it was hard to tell their age, it was pretty obvious Joe was significantly older than Bait.

“Really? I guess we are five hundred years in the future, so full wireless virtual reality isn't too far a leap. I'm surprised you aren't full blown digitized consciousnesses just piloting robot bodies.”

Bait's eyes went wide and Joe sucked his teeth.

“Was it something I said?”

“Yeah... I mean you don't know, but don't talk about that kind of stuff to other people. Bad things happened when people tried that.”

“People, certain people, certain Imperial people, blame uploads for earth and the exodus and...” Bait started before suddenly cutting herself off after realising what she said.

“Uh... what happened to earth... and exodus? I... oh... that's why this ship is an ark isn't it.”

Joe nodded gravely.

“Back in the late 21st century we developed AI, and despite everyones doomsaying, that turned out fine. Turns out intelligence does not mean consciousness, so they were just great tools. After that nobody really thought much of uploading human minds into a machine, and, well... turns out giving human beings root access to their thoughts ambitions emotions and other core traits rapidly results in people turning themselves into psychotic monsters capable of hacking anything and overturning the world order. The world rapidly devolved into upload overlords churning out war machines and fighting for dominance over the planet and solar system. Human beings just had to try to survive. Said survivors hacked several factories and we started loading up people in stasis pods into these arks.”

“So... someone probably loaded me into an ark thinking I was just another survivor... refugee?”

Joe nodded. “Once the uploads started heading downhill I bet you're whole resuscitation got put on hold. Everyone was just trying to flee as fast as we could.”

“On what? We were nowhere near FTL transit technology when I went under, and it sounds like it was not that long after I was put under that all this happened.”

“You are correct, the vessels 'slow boated' away from earth. There were many destinations, and we are not sure how many made it, but we have records of all the ones coming to this cluster of stars.”

“Cluster? So do you have FTL now?”

“Yes, we actually made great strides in technology during the trip, which took several hundred years. Several scientists kept their minds active, though not fully uploaded during the trip. It's actually the basis for a lot of the technology our country uses.”

“Okay... wow... so many questions, um... what is your country?”

Joe let out a loud sigh and Bait loudly proclaimed “The Coallition of Objective Galactic Singularity!”

I blinked, and then slid my chair a few inches away from Bait.

“What?” Bait asked.

Joe let out a muffled voice from where his hands were both covering his face. “It's stupid, So stupid, I just hope the next time our name is up for vote we get more people who don't want to make our name a stupid acronym.”

“What? Voting on your name?”

“Yeah, it comes up every few years. One of the issues with direct democracy, we are at the whims of the collective zeitgeist. Someone posts a funny meme, and all of a sudden we're having a vote to change our name to C.O.G.S. It happens every few years.”

“You change your name every few years?”

“it's not that big a deal. In nearly all documents our name is set up as a variable, so all links remain intact and it doesent break anything. Anything that does break, well, that's an indication that there is something you need to fix in your code!” Bait said.

Joe looked at Bait and sighed. “Sometimes people need to grasp concepts not only represented by code. Having a name for our country... faction... whatever gives us something to grasp onto. Changing it every few years is antithetical to that.”

“Whatever old man” Bait replied, rolling her eyes.

“So... I don't mean to offend... but just about every country back where and when I come from that had that many words in it's name was capital E Evil. Democratic People's republic of korea, people's republic of china (at least once they started putting bombs in their soldiers helmets and forcing their mountain villagers into reeducation camps), Democratic people's... maybe it's the democratic bit that's important.” I said, rambling a bit as I finished off the food in my bowl.

Joe reached over and grabbed my now empty bowl. “More?”

“Yes, please, I don't think I've ever been this hungry. The more I eat the more I NEED to eat.”

“That's your metabolism slowly coming back online after the stasis. The stasis pod kept you're body at a low tickover, while applying various treatments to help prevent, and for certain cell lines reverse the aging process, but it had to turn off a lot of your metabolism to do so. That's all spinning back up. Don't overeat though, you're stomach isn't used to food.”

I nodded as I dug in to the now full bowl.

After I had finished I sat back and looked at the two of them.

“So... what I've put together so far. Uploads took over the earth and went to war with eachother, the rest of humanity made a bunch of sleeper ships and shipped out. It is now however many years later, and this is a sleeper ship that made it here and was never opened up. Why are you waking us up now?”

“That's about right...” Joe said.

“We need people” Bait blurted out.

“What?” I replied.

Joe sighed.

“Okay. Now for the political part of todays lecture. There are four... countries, factions, empires, whatever currently running around in this particular cluster. Our sleeper ships stopped off in a relatively dense cluster of stars, several dozen, each with planets of varying value. We also discovered a form of FTL that allows rapid transit between resonance points in space. It's generally more likely to find them between two massive bodies, like stars, that are relatively proximal to eachother, so we have chains of resonance points that make some natural bottlenecks in the cluster. You need really intense scanning and a lot of processing power to actually discover these resonance points so don't go thinking that someone can just find a new resonance point from a planet to a star or planet to planet whenever it's convenient, it takes years of dedicated scanning and number crunching to find a new pair, and they are all in pairs.”

“Okay, jump point style FTL, so far so stellaris.” I piped up, some of the sass I had lost long ago from my illness creeping back into my voice.

“don't know what that is but okay. So, after we arrived, we had an explosion of technology. Some scientists had kept their mind's working during the exodus, So... we had a lot of things to try. Cloning, genetic recombination, cybernetic augmentation...” Joe tapped his own temple with a metallic ting to emphasis his point.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“And, of course, people couldn't agree on what stuff was okay to use. 'Oh cloning is unethical' 'mixing our genes with those of xeno organisms could have unintended consequences.' 'Cybernetics will just lead to another upload disaster!' and well the few years of cooperation we had after the first few ark ships arrived fell apart pretty quick. Basically the three factions that control the most territory are pretty well divided by what tech they consider ethical, dangerous, or stupidly dangerous.” joe exposited.

“Us, C.O.G.S god I hate that name, as you can probably tell, embraced cybernetics and we explored mind uploading more. We discovered that three things needed to be done to vastly reduce the incidence of psychopathy in uploads, one, that they need a virtual environment to exist. Existing simply as code and having code inputs and outputs puts a serious strain on the psyche, and having a VR environment where they can interact with 'things' like a person seriously increases the time they can spend as pure data before corruption occurs. The second is locking out the ability to alter your own base code. Only licensed and trained psychosurgeons are allowed to touch someones runtime, because it is very very easy to screw it up. And third, and one of the most important, is to get them back in a physical body asap. Doesen't much matter if it's a meat body, an android, or even a starship rigged for full immersion, but they need an actual body to anchor their minds too. That being said, we have had individuals exist for up to a year of subjective time as data without suffering adverse effects.”

“Subjective time?”

“Yes, we are able to adjust our perception of time when we exist as data. Or even if we just have the right augmentations.”

“Ah, frame-jacking. I've read about that concept. It seems my love of science fiction is helping here. Take that Professor! 'Reading fiction is useless' My ass!”

Joe chuckled at this. “Good to see you are making jokes. I was worried you would be shocked by everything that had occurred.”

“I mean, I was born in the 90's, the 1990's I mean, my generation spent our entire lives careening from one global crisis to another, first terrorists, that started a massive war, then a financial crash, a global pandemic, the firestorms, the drowning...”

“Drowning?” Bait asked.

“Ah, well, massive climate crisis, made the sea levels rise and hurricane's came harder and harder, wiped out every major city on the coast of the atlantic and pacific. That happened... like a year before I went under? Honestly the only reason I was able to afford it was that I had been playing the stock market and had shorted the stocks of several major companies that were based almost entirely in Miami, so...”

“Jesus... wait you had to pay for your cryopod?”Bait asked, shocked.

“Yep. Had to sell my house, liquidate my assets, no insurance company would touch me cause of my condition, at least not without charging me even more, so... yeah. I was dying so, I figured, may as well try.”

Bait just stared at me, before Joe chimed in. “I think the idea of having to sell your house to pay for medical care broke her. I used to be a trader so I know how bad things can get in hyper-capitalist societies.”

“Trader?” I asked.

“We'll get to that. Anyways, where was I... Right! Finishing up with C.O.G.S why do I have to keep saying that name... We have a very individualistic society. Each citizen of C.O.G.S. Is essentially an independent entity. We share data between our vessels and collaborate, but each vessel is really only beholden to the captain. And most of our ships only have a single person, the captain, on board. To support the governmental structure we do require the citizens to contribute in some way, but that can be anythign from raw material to serving in military exercises. The government does have a credit system that it uses to trade with planets and other factions, but for the most part, everyone is on their own.”

“They don't need to buy stuff themselves?”

“Not as much as other factions. Our materials tech is far in advanced of the other factions, mostly because we are willing to link our minds to our ships and 'frame-jack' ourselves, so we can instantly telepresence ourselves to any part of the ship that needs a more personal touch. Plus we can have entire technical manuals downloaded into our working memory, so... yeah. Instead of having one ship with dozens of crewmen, we have dozens of ships with a single crewman.”

I frowned. “I mean, that sounds good from a numbers persepctive... but I can't help but think that if I need to be connected to everything, that would mean any severing of connections would be... catastrophic. More catastrophic than if I had a bunch of crewmen running around doing damage control independent of me.”

Bait frowned but Joe nodded. “You'd be right. A single one of our ships is generally not a match for an alliance or imperial vessel of the same tonnage, due to them having a whole lot of crewmen who can deal with jobs independently. Some of us have put in battle nodes, where we temporarily upload copies of ourselves so we can have backups in case of severing, but you are right it's just not the same. Good thing in terms of vessels we outnumber the empire by five to one and the alliance by ten to one.”

I blinked. “That kind of disparity should mean you should easily win any engagements with them... but I gather that is not the case.”

Bait took over. “Because of our focus on independency, actually gathering a force to fight is... dicey. Essentially a planet's garrison force puts out a distress call, and then it's up to people who want to defend it to convince more people to defend it... which isn't always easy.”

“I would gather not, especially if there is no punishment involved for not getting involved. Why risk your own life?”

“We prefer to use incentives rather than punishments, though it's not as bad as risking your own life. One of the things the government guarantees is that if you do lose your life, you will be reinstantiated from your most recent backup. Add to that that each of the factions have a pretty decent prisoner exchange setup, and that your control unit aboard ship is in essence it's own escape pod, and we actually suffer relatively few deaths that we even have to re instantiate after every battle. All that being said, we generally can only muster a 3 to 1 or 2 to 1 numerical advantage in combat.” Joe said

“It is especially hard to convince the die hard scientists or freighter pilots to join the fight, since they tend to customize their vessels for duties that are not combat related.”

“Ah, so that 10 to 1 advantage is ALL of your ships versus just their navy, since you don't actually have a designated navy. That makes more sense. China was like that, inflating the numbers of their navy by designating things that were obviously not proper combat vessels as naval vessels.”

“Hey!” Bait protested.

“I calls it like I sees it.” I responded.

“We do have more on board ability to re-structure our vessels. Really it wouldn't take long to convert a freighter to a combat vessel wit hour on board tech, but I get your point.”

“So what, do you have atomic 3d printers on board or something?”

“Exactly! High speed 3d printers. As long as you have a store of raw material on board you can build your ship however you want. It is faster to bring said raw materials to a COGS shipyard and just exchange it, there is a certain economy of scale with the printers, but still.”

“Is that where incentives come in? Print time?”

“Exactly yes. And or raw materials, you can ask for social credit if you say are trying to set up your own enclave out in the boonies, there are a lot of incentives for helping out the government.”

Everyone was silent for an awkward moment.

“So, you mentioned trading with planets, the way you said it made me think they arent actually a part of COGS... could you cover that?”

“Right! Before we go to the other factions. So planets. Hmm... Well, planets both are, and aren't part of any of the factions.”