Two Sides History

Some histories have many sides, this has only two. Both are equally true and equally important. That’s a problem because you are likely to believe foremost in whatever I tell you first.

Verbal language being what it is, something must come first. So, be advised.

You saw the lights of the first day of XXI century, accompanied by the noises that where still popular at that time in fireworks. Before the arguments about children and pets sensibility lead to silent fireworks for over a century. You lived your live, loved, worked, got yourself a graduation and different jobs. Kept yourself in the right side of the law, for most part, practically all the time. Without ever considering yourself a fanatic for doing so.

You made 20 years, 30, 40, 75. Your saw the panic induced by media around Corona Virus. You saw the news about Ukraine, Israel, Mexico. The Hurricane of 2052. The incident in South Africa seven years later.

Your body weakened with old age. You reached the end of XXI century so fragile that a fall would kill it, watching the mute fireworks of January 1° of 2100 your mind was still sharp enough to understand that fragility of your body.

Almost blind, deaf, cognitive capacities severely compromised. You survived 2130. The beginning of Orbital Mining Industry passed unnoticed above your head. As did the first metallurgic plant on the Moon. Without children of your own, most of your relatives and friends dead by this point, or facing their own natural decay, your care felt in the hands of public institutions.

For your good fortune your country was taking better care of their destituted elderly population than most other nations.

By the middle of XXII century people started talking seriously about indefinite longevity.

Gradually, treatments for effects of aging developed. And just 75 years later you found yourself as healthy as you had been in your best days of youth. You “looked 75” by your own description, when looking at a mirror. However, your body moved like 30.

In the following century age became optional entirely, in appearance too.

Needless to say, retirement was out of the table for everyone. Go back to work was not an option to you, it was a necessity. However, it was not a bad thing. You would wish nothing different.

You saw AIs more advanced than you had ever imagined possible, but still a mere promise of something more. You saw in the news the first genetic projects develop cats and dogs capable to speak. Decade and half later you found the “brands” for selling in pet stores. Those things, able to think like three years old children, gave you the chills. You wanted to have nothing to do with them.

Unfortunately for you, they were everywhere, in the following years and decades. Young people didn’t shared your aversion to this innovation, quite the opposite.

Moral debates. Different countries adopted different laws about them. As if those conflicts didn’t mattered at all, the brands of “uplifted” kept multiplying, and advancing.

Independence Wars on Mars and the Moon hit the news, many Orbital Cities around Earth buying theirs one extra inch of autonomy at the time.

Uplifted animals became more intelligent. Some brands shaped in humanoid form, were almost hard to distinguish from humans in shadowy rooms.

To complicate matters further some people got genetic treatments to incorporate non-human genes for the most varied reasons. None of them good, and those people would regret this decision later, bitterly, but no one could have predicted it at that time.

Cyborg eyes, ears and limbs also entered the reals of fashion and futility. The mix was disgusting more often than it was charming. Still, sometimes, even you had to admit something borderline monstrous ended up also looking sexy.

The fact that at least some of those genetically manipulated people were legally pets (only people as old as you would use the world “****”, knowing it was an unpolite lexical choice in social situations) in more than half the countries on Earth didn’t escaped your attention. You would never admit it under ****, but it helped to intensify this mystic of bestial sensuality. Even when the cat eyes and years were purely cosmetic surgery without any genetic manipulation involved.

The Solar System was populated fast. Because people, particularly those born from 2080 forward. Increasingly obsessed with space exploration. Particularly, with the “dream” of spreading humanity.

By the time it was still called “dream”, more often than “project”.

External Wombs, artificial uterus, became the norm. Most couples having one or more children by month, on average. Never planning to see most of those children, only raising perhaps one or two every 50 years.

Public and private organizations were raising all those neglected children. Churches too, sometimes, but when in History they did not?

For common opinion, there was nothing wrong with that reorganization of family structure. Separating in a clear and definitive way the chosen children born to be raised by their parents to the normal ones. Vast majority. There is no malice, ill intent, or resentment involved in this distinction and the resulting contrast in family bonds.

You disagreed. But most people who shared your feelings on the matter were either as old as you, or older.

Self-replicating space-stations growing in size and in number. Faster than even that populational growing could populate them. Automated farms. Living space and resources expanded. Most of it, not on Earth.

Life was more comfortable. Far from perfect, but yes. More comfortable than you had ever dreamed possible. Not just for the richer, better educated or gifted with talents.

You never left Earth.

To be fair, stories about the life in and around the planets closer to the Sun described a far less ideal situation. Full of ugly, dirty, poor and violent urban areas. Where billions died every year just for insufficient maintenance in the air-filters and thermostats.

Earth population grew up to 7 trillions. Somehow, there was always a lot of free space for more growing, empty sits in public trains and opera houses. Cities raised above atmosphere, covered the ground of vast territories bellow the oceans. Orbital farms produced most of the food you consumed.

A computer as big as the Moon was build somewhere in the Solar System. The exact location was secret, but the project was the larger common effort made up to that point. All nations contributed in some degree, even those originally opposed to the idea changed their mind by the middle of the construction. The goal was to make a new kind of AI, super-intelligent.

Then came that great commotion. There was this reunion in Egypt, between representatives of coalitions of nations and other Powers of relevance. Huge.

You didn’t followed it with much interest, but was impossible to ignore the noise. The “Consensus of Alexandria” it was called.

Date was set in this “Consensus”, would be 100 years later, the date for the end of “Baby Steps Age”. Everybody had been calling it “Baby Steps” for some time. Historians and other intellectuals could never agree about the significant reference for the beginning of it, but was something between the end of XXI century and the beginning of XXII.

Alexandria defined limits for what should be considered human or not. A list of DNA was elaborated after, based in those deliberations. The special new AIs, “High AIs” are they called, became responsible for guard this rule. Those clear, unchangeable, borders. The eternal guarantee that humanity will never fracture into different species strange to each other. No matter how far in space it spreads, how much our population grow.

Also, humans would only live 300 years. No one, no human being, would live longer than that.

This decision was a shock to you, and scared you at first. Until you understand that would change nothing in your life.

The longevity limit would only be applied to those yet to be born. Even then, not immediately. For another 75 years after the Consensus of Alexandria humans would continue being born with right to biological immortality. Only those born after the year 25 Before Expansion would be subjected to the limitation.

“Expansion Age” would end “Baby Steps Age”. It would start with the first ships leaving the Solar System to populate the rest of our galaxy.

The oldest people alive, that you knew for sure, urban legends aside, had been born in 1949, and the day they made 1.000 years was cause for celebration everywhere in the Solar System. There was only half a dozen of those, But a couple hundred born during 1950. Some decades after was your time to celebrate that birthday.

To your surprise most the people alive in 25 before Expansion opted for limit their own lives. They died 300 years after that.

Most your friends, who were about as old as you, could not understand that decision. Neither could you. However, for the average person in the Solar System the feeling was that if needed no explanation. Was the “right thing to do” and anything else would be “hypocrisy”. No one ever managed to make you understand the logic subjacent to that proposition.

In the year 1.401 of Expansion a message arrived by laser informing that the largest Seeding Fleet ever build by humanity was completely destroyed by a unknow phenomenon. In Mystery System. No survivors, except the few left behind outside the system, on some icy rock on space.

The shock of that was not enough to stop, or even slow down, the movement of ships leaving Solar System.

A movement in the opposite direction was now stablished too. Natural resources, raw materials, products, coming from every newly stablished stellar system. The travels between starts could take many generations, each one of those ships carried billions of people, lineages that would expend generations in those travels. A new culture was stablished, adapted to the contingencies of life inside inter-stellar vessels.

The dream of every young person you met since Expansion Age started was to get a position, any position, inside wone of those Seeding Vessels. Children seemed unable to wish any other future. Was not personal gain they were after, certainly not primarily. They wanted to be part of the “great human adventure”. Contribute with the expansion of Humanity in its project of populate all stellar systems in this galaxy.

Generation after generation, it didn’t only continued. As far as you could say, if memory didn’t betrayed you, it only became worse.

Earth population decreased from 7 trillions at its peak to little less than 500 billions. Was gradual, and you barely noticed the difference.

The total human population in Solar System, on the contrary, kept growing. Despite the constant flux of people living in Seeding Fleets. Much larger than the number of people arriving from other parts of the galaxy.

Wars still happened, most of them local. Involving just a few dozen nations in the same planet, or space-station. A few conflicts of larger scale, pushing all nations in a Stellar System to choose a side.

When the huge computers necessary to create High AIs started multiplying through other stellar systems there was groups trying to steal the secret. To build their own “Hearths of Humanity” without follow the Consensus of Alexandria. Those caused the only Inter-Stellar wars that ever happened. Scary in scale, billions of trillions of people dying in each side. Dozens of systems involved in each conflict. Another starting each time one ended.

However, the defenders of Alexandria always ended securing definitive victory. Because they had the High AIs by their side.

The Magnetic Suppressor. A friend showed this device to you for the first time by the early days of Baby Steps Age. Back them, it was a tool used by some mystical cults with religions purposes. Something like a Santo Daime of sorts. Didn’t attracted you much, because of that.

First time you decided to give it a try was during year 1401 of Expansion. After the tragic news about Mystery Fleet.

You erased your memories, everything that happened after the day before Alexandria. That was the day when you ended a romantic relationship of 220 years with a woman. Who would later get declared non-human according to Alexandrine criteria, due to her excessive inclination to have her DNA altered. She was in one of those Seeding Vessels of Mystery Fleet.

For two hours the person you were in the present, in 1401 of Expansion disappeared. Your memory of the day before was about the day before Alexandria. In the year 100 before Expansion. You didn’t even knew that day would be named that. Your friends explained to you what you had done.

That you had used the Magnetic Suppressor of Memories.

To you, was as if you had jumped time. Your appearance had not changed much, but the world around you was completely different.

Fortunately, some friends were by your side, who you already knew before Alexandria. Your Personal AI was around too, and if helped. Those 2 hours gave you a frightening and enlightening experience of self-discovery. Once your full memory returned, you never forgot the feelings of amazement and conflict of the person you used to be, looking at the person you became.

Time passed. Expansion Age continued.

Scientific and technological advancements continued, but the speed of those changes slowed down. Confirming the old notion that the Universe has a finite set of rules. Basically, all had been understood by this point. Or almost.

Human population kept growing. From having more stellar systems than the human population on Earth by the time when you were born, it passed to have more systems than the current human population in Solar System. You stopped paying attention after that, but you knew things continued.

There was a ring around Mystery System, named Sealine. Full of researching projects, trying to figure out the last great mystery in the Universe. What killed Mystery Fleet?

Solar System remained the most important place in the galaxy, despite the general curiosity about the work taking place in Sealine. Earth was not the economic core of Solar System since the middle of Baby Steps Age, but it would always be the most important place in the Universe for humanity. In regard to Historical importance.

In the year 20.000 of Expansion you made the decision of use that device again.

This time you erased all your memory after the night before your 20° birthday.

Instead of 2 hours, you decided to stay without those memories for 20 years. Wanting to give yourself time to properly digest your reality. Build a new point of view, structure your personality, from that experience.

Understand, and judge, the person you became. From the perspective of that person you were when you made 20.

You take vacancies. Organize your affairs carefully, to be sure that your 20 years old self will not find any way to mess up your life. Too much.

This time, you isolate yourself from society. In a place where the first impact seems easier to digest. This time you will have the chance to process the situation as something like that should be processed.

Then, you used the device.

You saw the lights of the first day of XXI century beginning when you were 10 years old. Kept yourself in the right side of the law, for most part, practically all the time. Your mother died the next year, and your father was the main reason why you managed to enter university. Now he was about to marry again, and it was a heavy weight in your relationship with him, because you could not swallow the woman.

Well, least the feeling was mutual. To give credit where credit is due, she was better to hide the despise for you. In 2 more years you would end university, get a job, leave town, and possibly never talk with her again. Or whit your father, if had to be. How knows?

You were about to reach your 20 years. Tomorrow would be your birthday, you studied until late and went to sleep too tired to think.

When you opened your eyes, there was nothing familiar about the place surrounding you.