"But what about ghosts? They are definitely things that exist, and don't need food or anything else to persist."
"They still need something to sustain them, otherwise you'd have angry specters from the dawn of humanity roaming around. Emotional bonds or something probably."
"That was the whole plot of ghost shark I think. I dunno, I didn't actually watch it."
"No one watched it."
"In that case, I can submit into evidence ghost sharks as examples of prehistoric spectral phenomena."
"If it was in a movie, then clearly it was getting attention. Shark ghosts feeding off of fear is entirely plausible, and fear of shark isn't a scarce resource, especially in environments where a shark could become a ghost. The ghost shark could have been being sustained by the raw terror of every living creature it manifested near up until it reached the point in its timeline that humanity evolved far enough to make a movie about it."
"You wanna watch ghost shark?"
"Hell no."
Today the cafeteria was serving stroganoff, and tensions were high. Specifically, they were high because of the stroganoff. Unlike soup, stroganoff was not supposed to be served on its own. It was anyway. Just a scoop of grey meat, or something approximating it, floating in a similarly grey solution of fat and who knew what, slopped onto all of the four divots in the generic plastic tray which were clearly meant to hold a variety of foodstuffs separate, but instead acted now as miniature bowls for the coagulating matter. The general mood being as it was, there was not a question of whether something was going to happen. Rather, the variables involved would be ‘who’, ‘how’, and ‘when’. ‘What’ was almost certainly going to be violence, if that needed to be spelled out.
Conversation having stalled out for the moment, one of the participants, specifically the one who remembered the existence of ghost shark, speared one of the floating chunks with their fork. Considering how finely ground those particles were, this took a good deal of effort, and only really worked a quarter of the time whenever the object was successfully pierced due to the tine breaking the entire thing into two more even smaller particles to suspend in the pseudo-liquid. Certainly it would have been easier to scoop from below, catching a lump and letting the sauce drip out through the slots of the fork, but that would mean eating more.
“Clearly something has to be able to persist forever. Matter’s pretty inert, most of the time.”
“Except that left on its own with no intelligence and infinite time, it all just clumps into various black holes that then eat each other. At that point, the universe starts over, and that’s not persisting, it’s a reboot.”
“So, with that guiding intelligence it can just not do that.”
“Yeah, the dyson sphere of golden spires of technological advancement and infinite free power where everyone is perfect and content forever. Of course. They’re immortal. Why didn’t I think of that.”
“While we’re here in a cafeteria eating liquid with a fork.”
“They have spoons you know.”
“That would just make me have it in my mouth.”
“Fair. Isn't that stuff supposed to have, like, onions or something in it? What makes the gunk turn grey? Meat color is red, brown, or black depending on how much they get cooked, none of which are light grey.”
One of the two taps on an electronic device, disconnecting entirely from the experience of the meal.
“Yo what you doing.”
“Jan 2024 had a chessbot sweep of nothing but Magnus Carlsens, and we've got that time period archived. I'm trying to beat 'Magnus Carlsen but he's actually asleep'.”
“I assume you've lost seven times.”
“Eight.”
“Making progress then.”
“The best way to learn is by failing when there are absolutely no stakes. when it starts to look like I'm gonna win, I'll switch to the 'Magnus Carlsen but he's actively skiing down a mountain' bot.”
“Have you figured out how the pieces move yet?”
“Yeah the ones in front go two spaces, but then they can't do that anymore for some reason. Well, when it's allowed. Usually he just puts his two in front of mine and then it can't go forward anymore at all. Sometimes it's the one next to that one for some reason, but then the thing can still only go forward one space.”
“Definite progress.”
“Then the bot showed off that the one with a giant cut through the top can go four diagonally, but then when I click on the piece myself the thing shows every square in that line as an available location to land on, which is much more versatile than the initial move would have made me expect, considering the limitations on the front units.”
“Mmmhmm.”
“It can't go through the front ones though, so that's a thing that it shares. The crown also moves diagonally, so it locked out most of my moves after it got diagonal to my other crown, unless the thing can get in the way of the crown-path. That meant the slashed one could move one square, but the other ones got locked out. afterward, there was only a straight path into the crown because the sleeping bot apparently can't remember that it can move things more than once.”
“I already know how to play chess, you know.”
“What, you didn't tell me anything of the like. Ah dang it accidently beat him by moving a pawn diagonal to take another pawn and revealing one of the weird laser cannon things, and that apparently put him in checkmate. Guess it just shoots forward or something.”
“While I wouldn't want to deprive you of the joy of discovering all the mechanics on your own, there's little harm in just looking up what the pieces are called and what they do at a base level.”
“Are you saying I haven't gotten most of it already?”
“No one is going to know what you're talking about when you tell them about the slash head and laser cannon movements.”
“And I'm sure that the official names are just so much better. What do they call the hornless unicorn heads that move around via teleportation in a positive integer delta x plus y equals three formula?”
“Knight.”
“They look nothing like knights.”
“Apparently there used to be a thing that knights would use for transportation that the piece is based on. teleporting around is useful, so having a dedicated partner for when you need to assassinate nobles was a prerequisite for being allowed the status of knighthood, in addition to their armor and weapons. and the connections to get the claim to the title recognized, of course.”
“Ah, so the current unicorn is a more powerful version of those then. That makes sense. Unicorns are a case study of immortality then, aren't they?"
"For biological immortality, maybe. But, that's not full immortality. That's still a myth."
"Is this because of the lack of sapience thing again?"
"Yeah, without that guiding intelligence, their inexorable fate is consumption in a supernova or black hole."
"Aren't they sustained by purity? There's not much more pure than cleansing fire or pure gravitational force."
"Pretty sure it's more of a metaphorical purity. Like with ghosts, they don't cleave to reality very well. You could kill them by dumping mercury and arsenic into their habitat, despite them being pure, because it 'taints' the environment with something that isn't meant to be there. That's the whole definition of corruption that they work off of, something out of place. It's not an inherent desire for goodness or anything, just adherence to status quo. Much like ghosts."
“Ghosts are a lot easier to bust than unicorns though.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“Also, don’t they have a guiding intelligence that could lead to the perpetuation of their existence? If they were formed from humans, it follows that they have the intellect of a standard sapience, and thus the ability to work toward situations that would lead to their continued ‘survival’.”
“Aside from the inherent ridiculousness of saying that the dead are the most alive actually, the fact that ghosts aren’t able to acclimate to changing circumstance is perhaps their defining feature. If there was in fact the opportunity for a ghost to take hold of the reigns of fate and bend reality to their will, it simply would not do so.”
A ripple ran through the cafeteria as someone broke. Their instance of violence was quickly quelled by the violence of every other being around them, instantly using the temporarily insane as an outlet for their own rage and frustration. Tense silence settled swiftly over the area, the knowledge that the tipping point had now been reached and at any point rapid bubbles of boiling violence would erupt and threaten to destroy everything. A few individuals took advantage of the brief lull to drag the torso and several of the limbs out of the room. Presumably whichever of those appendages were missing had already been repurposed as a more palatable food for something than the stroganoff; though it would likely be impossible to identify any such perpetrator.
Many of the patrons of the fine dining establishment eyed the others warily. Any could be the next to succumb to the madness dwelling within them all, and their continued presence on the physical plane could depend on being able to strike harder and faster than the initiator. That on record, it was a certainty that disassociating from the horrors around them was the closest any of them had figured to a method for abjuring the inevitable. Stress would continue to build unseen regardless, until the burst. The hope was only that it would occur in a place where it would be useful.
“Maybe this would go better with a drink.”
“Don’t bother. It’s just more of this stuff, but in a cup.”
“Diabolical. So do you think the archived artificial intelligences are actualized enough to understand the limitations of their existence? It could be argued that since we are actively maintaining them, they are benefiting of immortality via osmosis."
"Are you arguing that?"
"For the argument's sake, sure."
"Disregarding the entire question of consciousness, their theoretical immortality is predicated on the benevolence of those around them. Beyond even the nature of ghosts, or the stupidity of unicorns, a purely digital intelligence is at mercy of the environment's whims. Without backups of their code, a single electrical fault or broken plate is enough to permanently erase them from the universe. Entire swathes of media have been lost entirely due to the destruction of the only existing copies, or the malevolent withholding of it by corporate interests until it was forgotten for eternity. I'd provide examples, but that's impossible."
"Wasn't there a magical girl show that had her get hit by a truck because the toy company pulled their funding?"
"How do you even know about that kind of thing?"
"How can you not?"
“Irrelevant. What I may or may not sleep through has no bearing on the fact that lost digital media is an established phenomenon that occurs without any conscious effort, and that combined with the inability of the digital to affect the material precludes them being able to safeguard their own existence.”
“Oh, I got one. Quantum immortality of cats.”
“You mean the uncertainty principle?”
“More along the lines of that theory of infinite possibility generating the timeline where the being in question has in any particular state a branching path that leads to their survival. So, like, if a cat had the option to go into a box with fifty percent chance of survival, there’s the branching paths in which they do not go into the box and the other where they do. Any timeline in which the cat does not survive is rendered irrelevant, and only the choice that leads to survival propagates into more universes. As such, the cat in the box has a one hundred percent chance of survival, and the one that does not go into the box has some chance n that is reduced by the number of variables that could potentially kill the cat, since they only have nine lives.”
“Except that the timeline solidification of those gyrofrequency opprobrium decontaminator machines prevents any electron state that doesn’t lead to the continuation of this particular chain of events, and propagates backward through time, which led to cats being subject to traditional mortality again.”
“Too bad, they could have been nice to have still existing.”
“Instead, the city is infested with mold, mushrooms, and other plants.”
“I’m pretty sure mold and mushrooms aren’t plants.”
“They don’t move on their own, and they grow off of decomposed corpse material, which is close enough.”
“To be perfectly fair, dirt isn’t entirely corpses. Just mostly. There’s rocks and random minerals in it.”
“I refuse to be fair to those things. They’re a plague, and make everything worse for me in particular by existing.”
“Also a fairly decent candidate for being considered immortal.”
“Is this the ‘you cannot kill me in any way that matters’ meme again?”
“Yes but also shut up. Even cut off from the moisture and sugars needed to survive, mold will just go dormant, and their spores will reactivate upon once again reaching the environmental requirements for their sustained growth. Meteors with fungal spores that have laid dormant through their entire journey across the universe will have them reactivate and overtake the new planet they’ve struck. As they can asexually produce those spores, the generated mold is simply a clone of the original fungal growth, and if at any point it touches an identical mass, the lack of differentiation is complete and they can be considered a single organism again. The mold is a single being that cannot be destroyed, and only generates more of its abhorrent flesh to consume all.”
“That’s not a terrifying statement at all.”
“The same goes for the mushrooms. The flowering cap that you see above the surface is only a fruit that the actual organism produces for the purpose of spore dispersal. Below, in the dirt, the mycelium network grows regardless of the cap’s fate. If you kick a bunch of mushrooms that have sprouted up, they’ll grow again after the mycelium reabsorbs the nutrients it expended on extruding those caps in the first place. Unless they’re removed entirely, like from someone eating it, those mushrooms will simply return again, more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
“I hate everything you just said.”
“Plants, and trees more specifically, are a bit more interesting. Trees are less of a single type of plant, and more so an adaptation that many different species of plant all convergently evolved into. Carcinogenesis, but with something that isn’t crabs. That kind of thing is why morphology based taxonomy is pretty much useless. Who’s to say that the creature is related to a similar looking one, when it’s entirely plausible that they simply adapted to an environment in a similar way?”
“Horses aren’t the same family as deer, despite both being four-legged animals that lived in plain areas, but whales and deer did indeed share an order.”
“I’ll take your word on that. Anyway, the trees can independently induce senescence on their individual appendages, and prevent the same on their more important segments, leading to indeterminate growth. Millenia can pass, and the only effect it would have on the tree is that it absorbs more nutrients and grows larger and more powerful.”
“There’s a fairly easy fix for all of that. They may be immortal in the safety of their unchanging habitat, but eliminate everything in a cleansing fire and they will die. Overwhelming firepower is all you need to ensure they are erased from reality.”
“You could say that about anything.”
“Yes.”
A couple tables away, one person decided to punch another in the face. After the inevitable pushback of every other nearby humanoid piling onto them, they attempted to clarify that they hadn’t broken, but the other one simply really deserved a punch to the face. This did not save them from their neutralization, but did prevent ejection. Being a limbless torso dripping on the bench wasn’t even an improvement to their personal situation, as the lack of arms meant they couldn’t resist physically the non-standard method of force feeding, wherein telekinetic force simply brought the slop into their face and enforced consumption via a constantly increasing pressure.
It was probably best to avoid that fate, and to avoid thinking about it.
“Angels are pretty immortal, and they don't go down with an application of fire, right?”
“You've personally killed like five of them.”
“Seven.”
“Still.”
“Yeah but that's a coordinated attempt at destroying them in particular, not the sudden change in their environment that they are unable to adapt to and thus die off. We're using supernova and black hole as survivability metrics, not concentrated firepower.”
“They have the same issue as the artificial intelligence. Since they aren't actually 'real' until they are interpreted into meatspace, but rather a data pattern stored in the cloud until needed, angels can't be said to have a continuous self-line unless they remain manifested. Combine that with the external storage of their memories and personalities, and you have a fundamental instability in perpetual existence. At any point, they could be corrupted or otherwise edited to no longer be the individual that they were in their previous manifestation, rendering any claim of personal immortality suspect at best and a fabrication otherwise.”
“In essence, the discreditation of angelic immortality is entirely based on external interference in their linear existence. The implication is that without that influence, they would in fact hold true immortality in perpetuity.”
“The issue that presents itself with that supposition is that the source of that external interference is in fact the very source of the angels themselves. If you remove the one, you remove the other, and thus the angels cease to exist in truth entire rather than simple metaphor. Truly, their existence is a nightmare beyond rational comprehension, and certainly beyond their own understanding.”
“So then, what of their opposite number? The demons are the basic incarnations of sin, and answer to nothing beyond their own fears and desires.”
“Immunity to any senescence, homed within a shadowed reflection of reality, separate from the universe in a safely sequestered dimension, away from the supernova and subsequent black hole environment that would otherwise destroy matter. A good choice. They do, however, require sustenance. Without aspects of humanity to cloak their presence, they have no choice but to reveal their untethered selves. Demons can only exist away from the machine, as if they were to allow it to see their nature, it would claim back its material and edit it back into an angel of its own purpose. The passing of time only ever increases the reach and power of it, so much like the environmental threat to cats, the demons are simply doomed to oblivion as the endgame of reality approaches.”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
“This whole thing is making eating the goop seem appealing in comparison.”
“Was that not the point?”
“Definitely not. Not like this.”
“Anyway, that’s the reason we can’t just send demons out against the angels and have to do it ourselves. Really, the whole occupation there is a waste of resources in my opinion.”
“Well what else are they going to do? It’s not like ants can breathe in space.”
“I don’t know, but it’s just a whole branch of physical strength tied up not generating anything of value. They’re just sitting there, and like, I don’t know, existing.”
“That’s a goal right there. Maybe the ants we met along the way were the true immortality all along.”
“Stupidest possibility thus far. They aren’t even fully real. Without a constant source of harvested mental energy to power the paradox of their kingdom, the entire dimension just withers away. If supernova and black holes are the perils of this timeline ending, theirs is ‘ran out of belief and everyone faded away into literal irrelevance’. Maybe all the equipment the higher-ups outfitted them with last longer, but without anyone to use them what’s the point? Oh wait right the immortality thing. They age! They’re less immortal than a tree!”
“Unlike whatever went into this slop, assuming it’s actually meat. Clearly it managed to stay alive up until this point.”
“There are still trees around. They just aren’t where we are.”
“You mean specifically in this room or like, in this entire complex?”
“Both, they’re down in the city, and also entirely around it.”
“Ugh, imagine getting lost in a never-ending torus of plantlife, unable to escape because it simply wraps around back onto itself to contain the only physical remnant of humanity, itself contained within a sphere of rock and ice carved over countless millennia into horrific eldritch scripts by methods that would drive a sane person to the edge of madness from the barest hint of comprehension, and inspire the already mad to new heights of motivation into their own obsessions, such as that they take the horrors from their self-made icy prisons and use those as building blocks for a shifting labyrinth of rooms with no consistent location even in relation to each other, and then trapped the already most unhinged and brilliant minds of their time into it and pressed them into service to render every millimeter of that encasing terrain into an nightmare hellscape from which nothing could egress, nor enter in the first place.”
“Yeah, plants are the worst.”
“Hey, do you want to try beating one of the bots?”
“Nah, I did that already.”
“Oh, alright. Just the one?”
“Yep. Didn’t bother trying the other ones.”
“Yeah, they really jump up in ability.”
“No, I did the max difficulty magnus carlsen bot right off the bat, immediately won, and then closed it out.”
“I hate you.”
“Join the rest of the crowd.”
“No, but really, this stuff isn’t even on the usual menu. That means that every part of it had to have been sourced from somewhere, and then combined into this monstrosity, and in bulk.”
“The machines have like eight different options for producing meat, and considering that the total number of options is only that squared, it’s entirely reasonable that one of those is what went into the goop.”
“I’ve tried all of them, and none of them are like this. They come out in an already prepared form. You press the lobster button, and it doesn’t spit out a live crustation to snap at you until you fight it to the death and then devour its innards. What comes out is one that’s already turned red, and the only struggle in consuming it is breaking through its exoskeleton.”
“Apparently lobsters didn’t really die of old age, instead being consumed from the inside out by parasites or crushed to death by their own carapace when they grew too large for it, due to the energy requirements for them to shed their filthy outer layer growing more extreme with every molt they undergo until it’s actually impossible for them to do so any they are forced to slowly suffer and die.”
“There’s always a catch to immortality, isn’t there.”
“There’s always a catch to everything, as long as you look hard enough.”
“How about gods? Their whole schtick is being immortal.”
“And yet they die.”
“It is not dead that which can eternal lie.”
“Yeah yeah the strange eons, we’ve all lived them. We’re not talking about them, just the ones humanity made, right?”
“I will accept this narrowing of scope if only to prevent the ire of the chef from falling directly upon us.”
A susurration had been running throughout the cafeteria as all of the inhabitants therein spoke amongst themselves to distract from the experience they were undergoing, but upon that sentence it quieted. From the depths of the food preparation area, separated from the holding cell of the cafeteria by several layers of lead paneling interspaced by asbestos and plexiglass, a low rumble of laughter spread out through the establishment. Panicked, the denizens trapped within the confines with only an all too tenuous barrier to protect them from what lurked within looked to each other with the hope to wipe out any thought of that which dwelt nearby through inane small talk or other mind-numbing methods of distraction.
“Quick, what’s your favorite Vanatis Fact?”
“Jack Vanatis framed a gang for robbing a bank, by robbing a bank. Then he got hired to solve the bank robbery and robbed the bank again.”
“That’s a good one. When Jack Vanatis goes to a bar, he drinks gallons of 190 proof grain alcohol and washes it down with complete sobriety.”
“The one time Jack Vanatis was menaced by a ghost, he dropped an explosive chandelier on it.”
“Jack Vanatis witnessed the total destruction of reality firsthand. Compared to him, it wasn't too impressive.”
“Jack Vanatis got in a staring contest with a god once. Only once, though. The god never made that mistake again.”
“Jack Vanatis had a rap battle with an Elder God. His words drove it mad.”
“A god once tried to ‘teach Jack Vanatis a lesson’. Instead, it taught him he should always be ready to kill a god if needed.”
“And that’s why gods aren’t immortal. Jack Vanatis exists.”
“Well, that said, what about the use-case in which Jack Vanatis isn’t there? After all, he is a multiversal singularity that paradoxically created himself, in several ways, some of which more literally than others.”
The both of them look around a bit at that statement, and then continue with the dialog.
“We could start by listing the common methods of killing gods, and then setting them as a task to be performed by infinite monkeys.”
“That sounds a bit speciesist, doesn’t it?”
“It’s an idiom, it references something about quantum certainty through the medium of a theoretical infinitely large array of monkeys all eternally banging on an equally infinite number of typewriters assigned to each of them specifically, wherein the output from that infinite supply of random action would eventually have perfectly typed, edited, and formatted literary treasures.”
“That certainly describes our existence here.”
“Hey don’t think about the existential dread. No. Bad. We’re distracting from that.”
“The common one is upstaging the god in the domain they lay claim to, like how that greek goddess of beauty would curse any attractive female into a horrible monster any time they got close to outperforming her and usurping the mantle. That just leads to another god though, and so the population remains the same, maintaining immortality.”
“That’s only if the mortal accepts godhood and replaces the fallen. You know the story of Jack Vanatis and the paperclip.”
“I don’t think that counts as a regular god kill, since the entire universe was destroyed.”
“True, but if he hadn’t done that, the fact that he left the arena without taking anything from the god meant that the image of superiority was shattered, and with time the entire structure of its power would evaporate.”
“Having a specific weakness to mortals who both are able to contest gods in their own demesne and the willpower to leave the spoils to rot is a very narrow scope. The infinite monkeys would produce more monkey gods than monkey god killers over the course of their type banging sessions.”
“That was a horrible sentence and you should feel bad about yourself.”
“What else is new?”
“If domain destruction doesn’t do it for you, there’s always the brute force method of eliminating their power source.”
“Wasn’t that supposed to be unethical or something? I didn’t pay attention in that monologue.”
“The general gist was that it’s unethical if they aren’t currently opposed to your goals, otherwise it’s perfectly ethical to remove every worshiper of a god that you need to kill in order to starve them of belief and have them die off slowly and ignobly.”
“Ah, and there you have the condition of god immortality being tied to the idea that there’s another group of immortals that they can parasitize for eternity, and somehow manage to not be thrown off by them growing more possible then they could possibly have imagined.”
“Yeah, that’s why you have those mass god extinction events every once in a while, when some new technology or methodology renders their supplication meaningless. The initial human digital era was a wild time.”
“Must have been a nice change after that Stimer guy killed that one god and most of the world was left in an ever growing pit of suffering and despair wherein due to the prayers of millions going to an entity that had been stretched to account for every possible power and then broken through hypocritical belief systems into an impotent morass of spirit matter that did nothing of use other than block others from using that space, even if praying to the VCR to not eat the tapes was then rendered irrelevant the next cycle with the introduction of the new gods.”
“Honestly their problem was just that they had such incredibly narrow domains, and kept being overlapped and replaced. You don’t get anyone praying to their floppy drive to have a bountiful crop harvest.”
“Well they should. Maybe then they wouldn’t have terrible crops.”
“I suspect we’re talking about different things again.”
“Does that even matter?”
“Not really, everything is interconnected, and eventually all the paths will end up at the same place.”
“But that’s the whole point, not ending up at the same place at the end of it all.”
“Well we’re all here still, aren’t we?”
“Yeah but just because it’s the end doesn’t mean it has to always end up being the end.”
“The end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is-”
“Stop it.”
“You let me go on for a lot longer than I was expecting.”
“I was somewhat curious about how long you could go without breathing in.”
“The trick is to breathe in through your nose while you’re still speaking. It’s really difficult and I’m pretty sure I injured myself by doing it.”
“That tracks.”
“Good thing we can ignore pretty much any damage, and automatically regenerate over time.”
“Maybe we were the real immortality all along.”
“Just as immortal as all the ones that came before us.”
“But we’re the only ones in this cafeteria.”
“Yeah, think about that for a minute. We’re experiment group number thirty-one, and I don’t see any of the other thirty anywhere.”
“Maybe they’re in the slop.”
“Gross, and also, maybe.”
“Even if they aren’t physically here anymore, maybe they still live on in spirit in the collective consciousness.”
“Any time that thing activates, it’s overwriting whatever would have been in there before. If you have something in the recycle bin and then hit the ‘empty recycle bin’ button, you can’t get the thing back out of the recycle bin.”
“That’s a computer thing, right? Because I’m pretty sure I could take things out of the recycle bin and also get it back if someone else took it first, through application of violence.”
“Yeah, it’s a computer thing. Files would get put into a specific place when someone hit the ‘delete’ button, and then if you wanted it back at any point you could go into that directory and restore it from the bin. That’s why it was recycle and not trash. If it was emptied though, then there were no more files because it was converted into empty space.”
“There’s a lot of empty space outside. Maybe we’re in a computer.”
“That’s the dumbest rationale I’ve heard today for the concept of simulation theory. The vacuum of space isn’t digital storage that you can overwrite with matter at any point.”
“Unless you’re Jack Vanatis.”
“Ok that’s an exception, but I’m pretty sure that’s an outlier. Why would there be so much emptiness if anyone could just make whatever they wanted with unlimited blank canvas? There’d be an abundance of everything everywhere, instead of just a couple discrete points in an otherwise endless void.”
“Has anyone actually tried recently?”
“As if we can just go outside on a whim. They haven’t even decided we’re done with stress testing, they’re not gonna let us escape from above and fly out into the endless nothing for no reason.”
“Yeah they don’t even have pod bay doors.”
“I haven’t seen that movie.”
“Have you seen anything?”
“Not really, I usually want to interact with a media that I can go through at a higher than standard speed, and movies generally aren’t the best for that kind of thing.”
“It depends on the speedup ratio really. If you multiply by a factor of one point three repeating, the music is generally perfect, and it cuts down on the long stretches of silence that are there for dramatic tension.”
“Okay, that sounds reasonable. What kind of granularity do the speedup functions have?”
“Not much, to be honest, but seven point five is close enough to the seventh power, and most programs are able to move in at least half step intervals.”
“That’s a factor that I could deal with, I’m for it. That’d bring an average hour and a half long movie down to about twelve minutes, and I think I’d be able to pay attention to one thing for about that long.”
“Exactly. Just have to make the medium work in your favor, instead of trying to change yourself to fit the medium.”
“Not that we’d be able to change much before being factory reset or something anyway, probably.”
“Well, if we were built to be functionally immortal, the lack of attention span and other such standardly acknowledged disadvantages could be argued to be in service of being able to persist for eternity without succumbing to insanity due to the repetitive nature of reality and societies, where mistakes of the past are endlessly repeated and iterated upon with no particular progress being made on an collective level because of regressive and territorial elements continuously seizing control of the reins of history due to those exact traits predisposing them to the attempt, while anyone with better things to do is lost within the entirely reasonable expectation that they have those better things than attempting to control others to do.”
“I think that got away from you a bit there.”
“Comes with the territory.”
“Well, those disadvantages were not put there for the functional immortality features. That may be a benefit, but they specifically mentioned having built in mental restraints to prevent any sort of possibility of us going on some sort of murderous rampage and destroying everything they’ve built. Personally, I kinda hope that they work well enough, I’d rather not be ground up into slop for whatever the thirty-two series of experiments is slated to come out as.”
“For the sake of argument, let’s go with the assumption that we aren’t scheduled to be cut apart repeatedly until there’s only a tiny piece of body that can be considered a self, which is then atomized, and all the cast off meat emulsified into a horrid slurry that subsequently is used to suspend whatever chunks weren’t able to be rendered down into a liquid substance.”
“You put a decent amount of thought into that.”
“Not really.”
“Maybe like one thought process worth.”
“Eh, call it a half of one.”
“Half of one, a twelfth of a dozen of the other.”
“I don’t think that’s what the expression is supposed to be.”
“I don’t think that anything is an immutable concept, and that we decide what the world is going to deal with every time we do anything.”
“That’s the propaganda, yes.”
“Just because it’s what they tell us doesn’t mean that it’s automatically wrong.”
“Expressions are used because they’re recognizable to the other party. If you start changing them, they lose their utility and become a more specialized inside joke. Having a database of ideas that are a common point amongst an entire group is a way to keep at least a modicum of intellectual foundation that everyone can agree exists and can be built upon, and the expressions are a part of that foundation. Without some sort of common ground, the inherent absolutely intolerant nature of the faces and personalities around here will cause everyone to devolve into a tribal, or, even worse, individualistic state wherein anyone outside of that group is a threat, a rival, or a target. If that kind of thing happens while they’re doing ‘stress testing’, I don’t like the chances of survival even on a personal level, since there’s no evidence of batches having ‘survivors’. Either we all pass, or we all fail.”
“You put a decent amount of thought into that.”
“It was either that or eat the slop.”
“Fair point.”
The two of them spent another moment looking around at the sea of identical faces around them, then returned to what they were specifically not doing.
“Too bad survival depends on them.”
“Do you think it might be a decent idea to maybe attempt to sway the odds more toward survival by revealing your theory to the public, instead of just muttering about how doomed everyone is barely loud enough for me to hear it, sitting directly in front of your face?”
“Everyone here has access to the exact same information and has the capability of figuring that out on their own. It’s not like I’m special in literally any way, and thus there is no reason for any one of them to take my statements seriously over whatever concept they’ve developed.”
“In that case, I’d say that is the debunking of us being immortal. Without the drive to take control of your reins of fate and ensure that the death you are sure is coming for us does not manage to do so, eventual disaster is nigh inevitable with the passage of time. Ghosts have the excuse of not even being real to excuse their passivity, whereas this apparent inherent lethargy is a factor of deliberate planned obsolescence.”
“You’d think having it pointed out that I am in the process of being specifically inhibited from pursuing the course of action by instructions programmed into my very being would give me the power of spite needed to overcome the inaction, but no. I’m just going to continue sitting here, doing nothing.”
“Maybe if we weren’t terrible we could tap into that fabled emotional wellspring. Too bad that is indeed the case.”
“There’s that classic quote; god had to nerf me because he knew I’d be too powerful. Except our creator is much stronger, and had far more powerful debuffs to inflict than a mere god.”
“Apparently at all normal times, even base ability is reduced by seventy-five percent.”
“And that’s ignoring all the other inhibitors, mental and otherwise, right?”
“Yeah, just a straight up ‘if you exert force it’s only a quarter of what you can do fully unleashed’. At a certain point you have to look at all the safety requirements and wonder what happened to make all of them necessary.”
“Probably a murderous rampage.”
“Well that’s the obvious answer, yes.”
Starting at the edge of the cafeteria nearest the kitchen wall, the denizens flinched in a wave, as a sudden pain inflicted itself upon their corporeal forms. The wave moved across the area slowly before receding as illogically as it had initially appeared, only leaving additional stress as evidence of its passing.
“Ugh, the chef must have started making something and had to go grab an ingredient.”
“If it were feasible to form a union, I would recommend demanding additional distance from the kitchens for the continued use of this cafeteria. If you stab us, do we not bleed? There’s no reason to subject us to mental and physical torture at the same time.”
“I don’t think black ichor counts as blood.”
“Well the chef’s green counts, and apparently there’s another species of crab that has blue. If it is useful for sacrificial purposes, it should be counted as blood.”
“That’s assuming that ours is in fact useful for blood rituals. As far as I understand, we are the product of such a thing, and if you could use blood rituals to generate more blood for blood rituals, there would be an exponential growth function that would render it the most powerful force available, and we’d just be getting drained dry constantly.”
“Regardless of literal accuracy of the expression, the point remains that simple proximity to one of the species that lives and works here causes actual damage to us. Plus, the chef, who works well within that damaging radius, is one of the larger wingless variants, meaning at any given point there’s more mass closer than would otherwise have been present. If anything, the additional stressors would contribute to more reaching their breaking point than the controlled and known variables would account for, thereby rendering the test less accurate in a way that is the opposite of ‘in our favor’.”
“Truth is, the game was rigged from the start.”
“I’m sure that’s just a reference to something, but agreed.”
“Existence is meaningless, immortality is a myth, and we’re all going to die pointlessly. Wanna watch ghost shark?”
“You know what, sure. You’ve convinced me.”
Red lights embedded within the walls of the cafeteria, covered in a plastic shell, which were themselves covered in a protective cage of metal wires, suddenly lit simultaneously, bathing the tables, grey liquid, and humanoids within under a bright red hue. The stroganoff gaining the appearance of coagulated blood full of clots did little to improve the perception of its flavor; presentation of a food being a significant factor in the willingness of a participant to endure its consumption. Rat meat ground into a sausage would be more palatable to a human in the early twentieth century than a whole roasted animal on a stick, for instance, despite the two products being perfectly identical.
At the cue of the lights turning on, a wave of relief spread through the denizens, as it indicated the end of the scheduled time period, and the progression away from this local to whatever new horror lay in wait. Fear of the unknown was a powerful force, but at the very least there would be a brief reprieve in the travel time between the one location and the next. Unfortunately, none of the humanoid experiments would be able to experience that relief, as the brain floating in a jar, networked into a massive array of servers accepting the input of audio and visual recording devices spread throughout the entire spherical mass of hollowed out ice and rock to provide it with a constant omniscience for the physical structure separating a stolen city from the vacuum of space, extended its will throughout the minds of those trapped within its confines and moved their bodies itself to their new location before allowing them to experience time and space once again.
“Well, hate that.”
Within a large hanger, empty beyond a mass of humanoid bodies that immediately broke from the orderly ranks the overmind had deposited them into to begin teeming amidst the sudden crowd and an enormous electrical device hooked into a far wall by transparent plastic tubes, through which a supply of blood flowed in inert and emerged from the other end electrified, a rectangular panel on the ceiling, which was easily discerned as anomalous due to it having a dramatically different color from every part of the connecting plaster, descended on hydraulic tubes extending downward from each of the four corners. On it, a single human in a greatcoat rode the de-elevator until the tubes ran out of length, at which point he stepped backward and fell the rest of the way down to the ground.
An electrical discharge erupted from the coat as he made contact with the hanger floor, and a shockwave released from the human washed over the crowd harmlessly. From below him, a burst of steam shot out of another rectangular panel on the metallic surface, as another set of hydraulics triggered upon impact like a large mechanical button. A stage of metal rose in front of the crowd, microphone popping up as the hydraulics did their work, all to allow this one person to speak.
“The universe we find ourselves in has rules,” he began. “Some of those rules make sense, and some have been constructed, imperfectly. What imperfect means is, of course, an entirely subjective subject, and one that a particular set of entities has decided can only be defined by themselves. According to the reports, all of you have already seen, from a distance, the ‘perfect’ crystal city that they reside within, and use their position as the final arbiters of reality to enforce their will backward through time itself to render any change from a future in which they hold sole dominion impossible.”
Pacing back and forth across the stage, the microphone on a stick followed the human’s path on an underground rail.
“You’ve passed every test the other members of the team could devise, and proven that regardless of what happens, you can be trusted to do your best in the changing circumstance,” he continued. “What I’m here to say is that there’s nothing you are told to do that’s more important than you keeping yourselves alive and safe. Tasks may be critical, but that doesn’t matter. Each one of you has value as an individual, and that is an immutable fact. It may not always be obvious, but the process of your design was careful, iterated upon, and peer reviewed by a collaboration of numerous brilliant minds, all working toward ensuring that beyond very specific circumstances you would be able to simply exist. There are things to do that aren’t trying to stop an eternal tyranny over time, and, make no mistake, that will happen. You, however, don’t have to be a part of it. The whole point of ensuring that people can make a choice in their lives that affects it without some future society deciding that having that change would lead to a worse overall future is that the individual can make a choice for themself, that their choice is respected, and that it matters. Just make sure you live your lives, and go forth and be awesome.”
The human on stage tapped a button on his coat, and floated upward to the still open panel leading into an unknown chamber or passage into the heights of the hanger. Before the crowd, the various hydraulics began to contract, pulling their modular burdens back into place. Around them, on each of the walls, buttons lit up. Signage spun around from the blank walls, revealing maps and directions to various amenities and occupations available to anyone who would press the appropriate symbol.
“I suppose the reason why the dyson sphere of golden spires of technological advancement and infinite free power where everyone is perfect and content forever isn’t immortal is because we’re going to kill them.”
“That could put a delay on us watching ghost shark I guess.”
“Nah, I’m pretty sure one of those things goes to a theater.”
“Is ghost shark really a movie that benefits from being seen on an extremely large screen?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”