Chaper 1

Okay.  So.  I was born a Duster.  Now, even if anyone were ever to find this journal, it isn’t likely it would be anyone from the Dust, so I guess I get to describe life as a Duster.

 

A “Duster” is what we call ourselves, those of us who were born outside of the cities of Earth.  To us, a city is just an object like a mountain, one which impacts us seldom, but when it does it does so profoundly.  They’re just those monstrously tall structures, hermetically sealed off from the planet, ranging from 30 kilometers a side to almost 80 kilometers in the case of Hong Kong, and up to thirty kilometers high.  Huge impositions on the face of the planet, they just sit there, having no relevance to the land upon which they stand and having no one inside with any interest in even looking out.  Not through a window anyway, since they have none.  They do monitor their surroundings mechanically, more out of paranoia we suspect than appreciation.  So narcissistically fascinated are the cities in their self-identity as space stations along the intergalactic lines; so single mindedly convinced they are part of the great space civilization; so completely cut off from their roots, that they just sit there and exist, unknowing and uncaring that at their feet there still exists a world, and the sons and daughter of their ancestors who never left the Earth to become citified “Star-Folk”.  To Dusters, cities are little more than stand-offish strangers’ huge life-support cabins inconveniently mounted on Space-Ship Earth.

 

Yeah, yeah, we all know how bad they said it was to live out on the surface 4700 years ago.  The whole population of the Earth scrambled into their isolated cities and forgot about the 0.0001% that didn’t make it to the doors on time.  Casualties of war, they called them.  Well, the wars all ended when the Legits showed up and built the cities for us in short order and taught us how to live in them.  The human race was destined for extinction otherwise, so there was no use pretending that we didn’t need to accept their offer.  We’d pretty much poisoned ourselves out of existence.  Once settled into the cities, the Legits helped police humans and administrate our adaption to that way of life until humans found their stride and took over their own management.  It was a bargain since the cost to humanity was simply our sewage, and the offer was not only our survival as a species, but the technological knowledge that we’d need to maintain ourselves, and admittance into the galactic community.  It seemed an offer too good to be true but there really wasn’t an alternative in any case, the Legits never showed us any sign of an agenda beyond access to our sewage, and we were told their only dictate was that only the highest administrative levels of each city would have actual contact outside of the cities, but otherwise we would be free to develop our own cultures and histories as we saw fit.  Later when humans began to over populate their cities it was again the Legits who provided the means for mass emigration to new worlds.  Those people who had been left outside took what refuge they could and somehow survived.  Today, the Earth is a very fine place to live, and it’s hard to imagine anyone who has grown up on the Dust choosing to become an agoraphobic Star-Folk even if given the choice.  And, for that matter, for which reason would a city want to take in a zero-value Duster?

 

But I guess it can happen.  I’m proof of that.  But the only reason I was allowed in (well, more like cajoled, seduced, coerced to come in) is because I am such a unique specimen of a Clay-Man.

 

It’s always a unique and very interesting story as to how a Duster could possibly become a Clay-Man in the first place, seeing as how it takes so much star-clay to become one.  When I was still outside on the Dust, there were only three Clay-Men to be found on the entire planet.  Now there’s only two, though I hear the clan was planning on forking out enough clay for a trainee from Inda to make the change.

 

So I’ll tell my story, just in case anyone ever actually reads this and gives a damn; and because hey, what the hell else and I going to do with what little time I probably have left?

2: Finding Star Clay

Chapter 2

My birth name was Rupert Hewston.  Man, it’s been a long time since I thought of myself in terms of that name.  I just go by “Golem” now.  Kind of my little joke, being a Clay-Man and all.  You non-Dusters don’t even get the reference, I know.  It's from an old Jewish story about a monster made out of clay, called the Golem.

Anyway, I was born into the 47th family compound of the Hewston-Hormoth clan, on our barony about an hour’s ride out of a town called Calgary in the ancient nation of Berta on the Candian continent.  And it really is a town, not just a little collection of farmers’ hovels like most places.  They say almost 9,000 people live there permanently.  It’s one of the principle business districts for the whole south-west, bigger even than Banff on our nation’s northern border where the University of Berta is.  Alsak to the east just on this side of the border between Berta and Skatchon, is our other agricultural center about half as big as Calgary.  Then there’s McBride, way over the mountain range to the west in Cumbia.  McBride’s a little bigger, with just under 12,000 they say.  They mine the mountains and harvest the forests there and it’s where almost all high-tech manufacturing is done; at least for the South-Western countries on continental Candia anyway.  So far as the seven SWTP (South-Western Trading-Partners) countries are concerned (including North Toba and Nudakota who just joined about eight years ago), brain power comes from Banff, the technical know-how comes from McBride, and everywhere else is mostly agriculture, forestry, mining and related industries.  Things aren’t greatly different in the other eighteen nations; Toba and Sou-Toba, all seven of the Tarios and the various Kebeks, all the way to the countries along the Atlantic Ocean seaboard.  They like to think they’re more sophisticated than the south-western and north-western trading partnerships, but really, they’re just bigger, that’s all.  Continental Candia hasn’t seen any significant boarder hostilities in 200 years and for the most part anyone can travel across the whole continent without conflict if they mind their P’s and Q’s.  We from the south-western countries even trade carefully but peacefully with the nomadic clans who live on the chaotic desert-ocean that constitutes the southern half of the continent, though we don’t go there unless in large numbers and heavily armed.  Life is relatively simple on the Dust.  You want complex, get taken into a city somehow.  Or, find a way to become a Clay-Man.

 

I’d just turned twelve when I went on my two month walk-about.  For no reason that I can recall, I decided to head south from Calgary and didn’t change direction till I found myself under the northern-most stilts of Lebridge City.  Soil and rock interferes with the integrity of the magnetic isolation coat on the outside surface of the cities, so they are all built on stilts rather than building downwards into the planetary crust.  Even air interferes with it to some degree I’m told, but not to the same troublesome degree.  I don’t know much about that technology so I won’t try to explain it.  But, that’s the way it is for all cities I’m told, so their lowest floors start from 5 to 50 meters above ground.

 

I’d been wandering, living off the land and seeking enlightenment in isolation, and I got curious and bored enough to get up-close and personal with a city since I was in the area anyway.  I wandered along the eastern wall of Lebridge City for about a week, just mindlessly being at one with the land till I reached the northern wall.  The land there is naturally very different on the northern-shadow side of the city.  Then I witnessed the fall of a star-craft jumper.  We all later presumed that it must have been something like a smuggler’s craft or some-such, which explained why no one from the city ever came looking for it.  In any case we concluded it must have been on the return leg of its run because in terms of the city’s economics, it didn’t have any overly valuable cargo, just a modest 29,520 liters of star-clay.

 

Now in the cities, star-clay is the basic commodity for everything.  Every technology is based to some degree on the stuff.  Gathered somehow from the mid-surfaces of red-dwarf stars, it is the principle commodity traded by the Legits; kind of an insect race.  We understand that other civilizations gather the stuff too, but so far the Legits seem to have the best techniques for extracting it in mass, so they dominate that market.  In any case, the price asked of Earth descendants is so cheap it would be ludicrous for us to go to the bother of gathering our own, even if we had the technological know-how.  No one knows what the Legits do with all that 98% dehydrated sewage, but that’s what they want in equal mass-measure for their star-clay.  It’s supposed that the human body produces something that they like to extract from our sewage, but no one knows for sure.  No one really cares that much.

 

In any case the heavy, grainy, almost jelly-like substance reacts so strangely to any other material that it must be stored and transported suspended in an electro-magnetic field inside a vacuum container.  It was pure luck (for me) that the jumper which I witnessed crash beneath the northern edge of Lebridge City had been making for the underbelly of the city when it hit the pylon that brought it down and killed the human controller.  Our scientists who tried to reverse engineer it later conclude that star jumpers aren’t meant to be maneuvered in such tight confines, usually having all of empty space to maneuver in.  It would take consummate piloting skills to get it under the city at all, which rather supports the theory that it was a smuggler’s craft looking for a hidey-hole.  No one else we can imagine would have any business flying a jumper under there.  Anyway, he was going slowly enough that the impact crushed the controller’s cubicle without killing the ship’s AI, so the cargo controls remained active and the container fields survived.

 

But you see, to us Dusters, that clay is as uncommon and as precious as it is common and cheap in the cities.  In the cities they wallow in the stuff daily, using it in virtually every industry from clothing manufacturing to metallurgical and structural industries.  They use it in the manufacturing of industrial reagents, reactants, cleansers and compounds, as a base for stimulating growth of food pastes and proteins, and ultimately of course, they grow their precious AI brains out of the stuff.  Dusters, not being a part of the star-civilization community, have no access to star-clay, having nothing of sufficient value or in sufficient quantity worth attracting the attention of any traders.  So you see to me at that time, it was like finding my own personal platinum mine.  Thus ended my walk-about.  I immediately called our clan council and they came at the run and gathered the stuff up within 72 hours.  That day our clan became the wealthiest clan on the planet.  Not even the Paquettes in Sou’East Kebek could rival our new-found clan wealth.  We Hewston-Hormoths have more wealth than any five nations added together, all because of me and my find.

 

To make a long story short, the clan council thought hard about how best to capitalize on this bonanza for the maximum benefit of everyone.  They concluded that to have their own personal Clay-Man could perpetually immortalize the clan and provide invaluable service for all Earth.  When I say “all Earth”, I mean Duster Earth.  Like I said earlier, the Cities are part of the star civilization and have virtually no dealings with Earth other than riding on its back.  We kind of use the terms “Earth” and “Dust” interchangeably.

 

What little star technology we Dusters have ever had has been limited to occasional city cast-offs, a little black-market trade with city criminal elements on very rare occasions, and rare accidental losses from the cities, exactly like my little find.  But never before in our history was there a find as rich in our terms as mine on that day.  When I left the Dust there were exactly 1,151 active Artificial Intelligences of various sizes on Duster Earth, including the one we salvaged from the smuggler’s ship which in fact was re-shaped into 3 smaller ones, and it took Duster Earth 3000 years to collect that many.  They are exquisitely precious and thoroughly pampered, doctored and humored to keep them perpetually happy, healthy and active.  The collective commemoration of Duster AIs that have died over the centuries is a religious holy day of thanks-giving, celebrated across the planet.  Without exception, they all eventually died for lack of star clay to feed them when they needed it, such that one would have to be sacrificed to use its clay to save all the others.  They need to be refreshed about every 300 years or so.  It only takes half as much clay to reinvigorate one as it takes to grow a new one, and their memories are almost as precious as they are, so it’s desperately important to Dusters to maintain them.

 

AIs are grown right from star-clay.  AIs are fascinating analogues of the seed brain-nerve material they are grown from.  In effect, they are artificial versions of a human brain, or in some rare, specific applications, other biological brains, like fish, porpoise, insect or bird; depending on the environment in which it needs to work.  I really hate working on insect AIs, and fish brains aren’t much nicer.

 

The techniques for growing AIs has been learned over a few thousand years from snippets of information gleaned from the very rare exiles and escaped criminals from the cities.  The University of Yakutsk in East Yerp is the only University on Earth where one can find expertise regarding, and experience in the growing techniques of AIs and Clay-Men.  All living Duster AIs and all Clay-Men on Dust, including me came from there.  The one exception is the AI we salvaged from my crashed jumper, which is now 3 AIs thanks to U of Y.

 

Like a human brain, AIs are prone to emotional and mental illnesses, but with significantly less tolerance for stress, having virtually no actual personality to ground itself on.  Their stability requires constant vigilance and maintenance by trained “Artificial Intelligence Therapists”.  AI Shrinks for short.  An AI can be maintained by an ordinary AI tech using manual communication and physical manipulation of the neural synapses, if the tech is very careful, very conscientious, and dedicated to just that one AI, usually for his or her whole career since once you get to know an AI personally, you have a huge advantage over someone who is just getting introduced to it, and because an AI can theoretically live forever.

 

A Clay-Man however, being converted into a creature vaguely similar to an AI, with nerve tissue fundamentally built upon that marvelous material star-clay; if within roughly 2 meters of an AI, finds him or herself in intimate psychic contact with that AI, and can (after 2 years of intensive training) mentally manipulate the mental landscape of an AI and “fix” a distraught, psychotic, depressed, suicidal AI in a couple of hours and leave a totally contented, happy and slavishly servile, worshipful AI to do it’s job with complacent satisfaction and unremitting consistency for a good 8 to 12 months before a minor therapeutic tweak-up is advised.  Stress that AI and the therapy needs to be sooner; under work it and it will get bored and sloppy.  But a well-functioning two-breasted (2 liters, or 9.2241 kilogram) AI can casually do the mental work of about 1000 mathematicians working continuously without meal or toilet or rest breaks.

 

There is a size component as well.  A micro AI that could fit snugly in a bean husk could run a wrist watch with a multi-function logistical calculator capacity.  Any smaller though and it fails to maintain its self-awareness and dies.  At the other end of the possibilities, any larger than roughly one and a half times the size of a human head (depending somewhat on the function being required of it) and it becomes prone to “psychotic loop” syndrome which can quickly cauterize synapses and physically destroy the expensive AI.  We get around that limitation by paralleling AIs with some careful filtering techniques.  They can’t function in series because any slight neurosis in the last AI in the series is amplified as it impedes processing backwards through the series, and in a similar way any depression in the first is amplified forward.

 

And there you have Artificial Intelligence Technology 101 training in a nutshell.

3: To Be a Clay Man

Chapter 3

So, the clan started to look for a member to send to the University of Yakutsk to make the change, and since it needs to be someone freshly pubescent to maximize on the change, I and 33 other clan kids fell into the eligibility category.  Of the 34, only I and one other were willing to take the change though and I was exactly the right age (he was six months older).  Also, I was the one who found the clay by which the change would be achieved, which gave me significant political leverage, even against my father’s wishes.

 

It’s considered to be a mini-death to become a Clay-Man, since what you are before the change is lost and can never be recovered.  It’s not like a tattoo which is permanent and will ride around on you for the rest of your life; it’s more like keeping the tattoo and changing the body beneath it.  You will still be humanoid and think basically like a human, with some processional differences, but really, you cease to be a human.  You become a Clay-Man; a product of the stars.

 

So it was that at the tender age of thirteen years and two weeks of age, I was sent to Yakutsk with 1,300 liters of star clay; 1,200 liters of the precious stuff for me to consume over the next 4 years, and the extortionate price of 100 liters as the all-expenses-covered cost for my program and living arrangements at the university for the next 4 plus years.  One liter of star-clay would be enough in the Duster world, to enable a person to live his or her entire life in very nice comfort without ever once raising a finger to work for a living.

 

I was fed my first dose of star-clay the day I arrived.  The first 3 months of the change are a living hell and I don’t really recall a whole lot about that time.  It was just a long period of unremitting agony and deep aching pain in every square centimeter of my body, inside and out, mitigated only marginally by the morphine and dimenhydrinate.  Then one day, just like that, the pain and nausea was gone, like turning off a switch, and then it was the psychosis, fear and paranoia for another 4 months; so profound I have no real, intellectual memory of that time either, only the emotional memory which is horrid.

 

Once that wore off and I was able to think something like myself again I entered the “disengagement” phase as they call it.  During this time the psyche has no true grasp of its place in the body.  It’s like the body sleeps, eats and defecates but there is no sense of personal involvement in anything the body experiences.  It’s a very odd sensation and it’s the most dangerous time in the process of changing from a human to a Clay-Man.  One feels the ease and detachment with which one could simply float away from the body and never return.  It takes a constant encouragement and reminder of purpose from one’s care givers to keep one from drifting off.  No one really knows what happens to a person’s personality if that happens, but the body simply goes into a coma and dies within a couple of weeks regardless of any physical life-prolonging measures.  It just shuts down as if by will.  A barrage of psychiatric tests before you even start the program provides the care givers with “handles” by which to keep you intellectually associated with your physical life and your body during that time.  With me it was the duty I felt towards my clan, to finish this process and become the clan’s Clay-Man gift to the world.

 

As a Clay-Man I would earn my clan the reputation of being among the most philanthropic clans on Earth  since Clay-Men are so valuable a resource no one clan can possibly have exclusive use of one.  To make me a Clay-Man was to offer me to the world.  True, over my lifetime (essentially, up to a millennium given maintenance) I would enrich the clan hundreds of times beyond the price of my changing, but there’s also the essentially unredeemable sacrifice of a child’s life to consider.  It was the gambling of a fortune of fortunes on an at best poorly understood and relatively sketchy technology.

 

So that was the first 14 months of my change.  There followed another 3 years of intense education and discipline training.  It is terribly important to keep the body healthy and strong throughout this process because very little change can be made either for better or worse once the change is complete or if you pause in the process for any reason.  The body kind of “sets” like a clay jar does when it’s fired.  I was required to train in yoga, martial arts, and long distance running and swimming.  There was “sight, smell, taste and hearing” training to keep my consciousness of those senses from fading as their nature changed and as my distracting psychic ability awoke and became more attuned to my surroundings.  I had to eat voraciously.  As one consumes the star-clay over those 4 years, one’s metabolic rate increases dramatically and it becomes a chore finding enough time between all the other training needs just to keep the body fed so it can build and maintain itself.  In fact, it is when this tappers off and the body resumes a more normal metabolic rate that it is recognized that the physical transformation is complete and only the mental training is left.

 

It took me 45 months from the time I took my first spoonful of star-clay till I was deemed to be completely converted physically.  Thereafter I would remain till I die the same grey skinned, grey eyed, hairless being that I am today.  We Clay-Men are insensitive to three times the range of heat and cold as a normal person, are unable to produce viable sperm or eggs, are repulsed by strong spices and intense flavors but constantly hunger for salt and sugar, are poisoned by chocolate, and we can see quite well in relative darkness and are moderately photo-phobic.  We see some way into the x-ray range and significantly into the infrared range, but our hearing is generally less acute than a normal person’s, as is our sense of smell.  We don’t sweat and we can control a lot of our metabolic processes such that we can fast from food and water for 10 days to 2 weeks without much discomfort.  We’re only mildly sexually functional; enough to have a sex life if we really want it, but it’s not really all that exciting to us.  We can take it or leave it usually, but we do get lonely just like everyone else.  We are hyper sensitive (not painfully, just an awareness) to pressure changes on our skin and are somewhat less sensitive to pain than humans.

 

As a result of all this, we tend to wear sun-glasses and as little clothing as necessary, and are a poor choice to party or go out for supper with.  We don’t change physically very easily or fast.  Hardly at all really, other than by prolonged deprivation or traumatic intervention.  I mean like gaining or losing weight or gaining or losing strength from exercise, or aging.  But we heal twice as fast as a human.  Our lifespan is estimated to be about 10 to 15 times that of a human and we’re immune to any biological infestation by anything indigenous to the Earth.  I mean, we mechanically carry organisms like e-coli in our guts like everyone else, but we will never get infected by any naturally occurring organism.  Mosquitoes don’t bite us and animals don’t know what to make of what little smell we generate.

 

However, the price we pay is questionably worth the advantages.  I’ll never have children, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever meet someone to love who will be willing to grow old with me and die without much sexual content in our marriage, while I don’t age at all.  I sold my youth for this clay body, and I’ll be an oddity and a freak among my people (Dusters, not humanoids generally) as long as I live.  I’m not whining here, I’m just setting the record straight.  Most people only think of the advantages.  There’s not much we need, and what we need is so easily come by (at least on the Dust), we tend to lose interest in what keeps life interesting for humans.  We tend to immerse ourselves in the arts and sciences to keep ourselves interested in life.  Beyond my basic AI psychology and technology degree I have the equivalent of a medical degree, I’m a veterinarian and a dentist, I have two engineering degrees and about a dozen trade tickets today, just out of interest.  I play piano, slide guitar, flute and violin quite adequately and I’m a fair painter and sculptor.  I can’t sing worth a damn and likely never will despite years of training.  I have several degrees of black belt in seven different martial arts including blades, staves and belts.  I’m a pilot, a lecturer and a political scientist.  I read and write 8 languages fluently and 29 more quite functionally.  I can call myself an astrophysicist and a particle physicist and a psychiatrist and an educator.  Despite all that, my IQ is just a basic 103; as ordinary as you can get.  I’ve just had the time, the inclination, and the opportunities is all.

 

But, to get back on track; the remainder of my founding 4 years in University was taken up in AI psychology and technology training, with basic social arts education and a smattering of general interest studies thrown in where they could fit.  Even though I am not technically an AI technician any more than a doctor is a nurse, as part of my training regimen, I personally grew 2 different types of AIs which are still in use today.  In a pinch I could do the basic techy stuff, but why would I ever have to.  I’m a Clay-Man.  There are lots of techs around.  But I know their techniques.

 

So, that’s me.  Of course the moment I graduated I was besieged with requests for my services.  Like I said, there were only two other Clay-Men on Dust when I graduated.  Two of us are males, and one female; not that it makes a lick of difference, but humans always ask.

 

We don’t tend to make permanent pairs between ourselves.  There’s kind of no point.  We group up occasionally, not necessarily gender specific pairs since sex isn’t really that big a part of our needs.  We like to hang with each other partly because of the intimacy of the psychic link we can allow ourselves to experience around each other, but it usually only lasts till someone gets irritated with the other person’s inner personal habits or something.  We’re always friendly with each other though, likely more so than humans are with their neighbors, simply because there are so few of us to relate to, at least on the Dust.

 

There is never any need for a Clay-Man on the Dust to be short of funds.  Our services are so much in demand all around the world that we literally dictate our prices.  It’s become a tradition now that whatever we are paid, 10% goes to a charity of our choice, and our employers donate an equal amount to a charity of their choice.  I never met a selfish or greedy Clay-Man when I was on the Dust.  When you can have whatever you want for the asking, simply by virtue of who you are, there’s no point in hoarding stuff.  It’s a good thing too.  Since we have so little need of what others value there is little anyone can use to coerce our services for unscrupulous or political ends.  So far in Dust history, we’ve managed to keep ourselves free of political entanglements.  There have been attempts, but we Clay-Men have always managed to side-step such attempts.  It’s understood by all that we will remain above and outside of political issues.  We don’t hold citizenship in any one country, clan or family.  We are the servants and the prima-donnas of the world.  We are a resource for the whole Duster Earth; period.  No judgment here.  Anyone can call on us.

 

If a Clay-Man didn’t find joy in his work, he’d be totally screwed.  Luckily, there’s an inherent sweetness about healing AIs.  It’s like a wash of cleansing, pure loveliness that pervades your being like clean mountain air or fresh spring-water whenever you untangle a psychotic node or break down a wall of depression.  The feedback is just plain lovely, and it never loses its novelty.  There’s just no other way of saying it.  Clay-Men have been trying to describe it to humans for 400 years now, but only poetic allusions to prolonged toned down sexual orgasms come close to getting humans to understand it.  We have our own word for it that we understand.  We call it the waveles, the wavele-wash.

 

For many years I sent half of my earning home to the clan coffers until the relative value of 1300 liters of star clay was paid off, then whenever I found I’d still acquired too much excessive wealth to be bothered with I found some worthy cause or person to unload on.  The other Clay-Men do similar things.  It’s a kind of tradition with us Duster Clay-Men.  Lots of times we work for free just because.  We’re a rare and invaluable resource for the Dust-bound human race, but our work is our joy and our blessing while our needs are very few.

 

You see, I can walk into a town and in one hour I can fix an AI that a human tech would have to work on for a month steady, and then likely miss a lot of the fine tuning that we Clay-Men do with a passing thought.

 

The only truly necessary need we have is for our own mental upkeep.  Each of us has a team of psychiatrists and counselors who are dedicated to being there for us if we ever need them.  Any type of mental imbalance in a Clay-Man can have disastrous repercussions if it leaks through into our AI therapy.  But even more effective is our mutual availability to each other for therapy if needed.  Luckily these therapies are seldom required since we are rigorously trained in meditation techniques and mental cleansing exercises and these are just a normal part of our day, more routine and normal than eating is for a human.

 

Oh, I was going to mention about eating.  People always want to know if I have to eat a bit of star-clay every once in a while to replace what my biological processes end up losing.  The answer is yes and no.  The body really has no way of evacuating star-clay.  The clay just cycles through the metabolic processes it’s involved with and gets re-absorbed and re-constituted as it does so.  Naturally, there is a little loss over time though.  Jonas Yantz, the Russian Clay-Man lost his right arm in an accident one hundred forty years ago, and surprisingly it slowly grew back.  It’s still not quite as long as his original arm was and it came back with only four fingers and no thumb, but he tells me it’s still growing ever so slowly, so who knows.  He gets a craving for star-clay a couple of times every year and finds about fifteen milliliters of the stuff satisfies his craving.  I told my clan to give him what he needs whenever he needs it and they always have.  The rest of us get an urge for a spoonful of the stuff about every five years or so.

 

Where he came from in Russia they don’t have clans as such, just families, and all his family is dead now, since many years.  He’s old, for a Clay-Man; six hundred and thirty four I think, or thirty five or thereabouts.  He’s as valued these days as a historical witness as he is for being a Clay-Man.  He actually met the first Duster Clay-Man.  When I say he’s old, I don’t mean because he’s been in the world a long time in physical terms, but rather in mental terms and because he made the change when he was 38 years old.  Because of that he’s never had a mental acuity like Ny (she’s the female Clay-Man, Cambodian by birth) who made the change when she was 17, and myself, who made the change just after puberty.  He’s still immensely more therapeutic than a human tech though, and he’s picked up and invented some very cagey techniques and mental therapies in his time, which he’s passed on to Ny and me.  It’ll be the end of an era when he dies, that’s for sure.  I truly love that old man.  He’s still going strong though.  Tends to reside in one place for long periods now because he’s seen everything and been everywhere, but in his duties he’s as active as ever.  No one’s ever heard of a Clay-Man retiring.  Just too valuable, and anyway, whatever else would we do?

 

Boy, do I digress!!  Okay, back to my own story.

 

So, I graduate and go to work and it quickly becomes evident that I’m the best Clay-Man ever produced on the Dust.  Not so great a claim since there’s only ever been 11.  I count in that number the two originals who were escapees from Dansk City way back.  They were the ones who first showed the Russians how to effect the change.  They’d brought a load of star-clay with them as currency when they thought they could just disappear on the Dust and never go back to Dansk City where they were wanted for political crimes.  Too bad they got found and killed before they did more than discuss the process with their hosts.  Too bad they failed to adequately stress the importance of the age of commencement of transition.  It’s taken the scientists at U of Y all these centuries to determine all the ideal parameters for producing a true Clay-Man and it turns out I am that first “true” one.  Ny who is 70 years my senior is pretty good, but they were still learning how to train a mind that needs to stay stable theoretically forever or at least for a 500 to 1000 year lifespan.  She’s pretty much picked up what was missed since, but not before some little damage was done.  She still has episodes of schizoid-effective disorder for brief periods if she over-taxes herself too long.  However, she was the first one they changed after they realized it maximizes on the potential results the closer the subject is to being just precisely post-puberty at the time of initiation.  Earlier and you kill the subject, but then the beneficial results diminish on a low logarithmic scale weekly post-puberty.  I guess with me they got it just right; so they say.

 

All right, so anyway, I graduate and go to work.  I spent 140 years living in different countries, experiencing just about every culture and leaning thirty-seven languages.  Ny and I lived together for 38 years steady once and have spent lots of times together since.  I have a similar history with Jonas, and we’ve all lived together for various periods several times over the years.  There was a new Russian girl who made the change 69 years ago now.  Her name was Svetlana Solovyov.  She was a fairly plain looking girl, but what a beautiful mind she had!  To be in her presence, with our inherently intimate mental connection, was to feel enfolded in the presence of sweet, gentle motherhood and feminine grace.  Everyone loved her, but none like Jonas, Ny and me.

4: The Star Folk

Chapter 4

I don’t think any of us had ever experienced any trauma like we felt when she was so brutally taken from us in an industrial explosion.  She went to treat an AI that had been way over stressed and left way too long without therapy.  It had become pathologically hostile and somewhat suicidal long before Svetlana made contact with it.  It reacted to her contact and took out itself and her in a spasm of paranoia.  The managers of the chemical plant had failed to take the plant off-line before she approached it, and it exploded the whole place taking 39 other people along with our precious Svetlana.  Anyone remotely responsible for that oversight spent the remainder of their lives in prison.

 

Jonas, Ny and I announced to the world we were taking a year off and we lived sequestered by ourselves way off in the wilderness of a small backwater country called Nadym, on the eastern border of Gudrussia.  When we’d finished our year of mourning we emerged again and the World Peace-Oversight Committee assured us that every nation around the Dust had signed an agreement that without exception, an international team of Preparation Specialists would oversee preparations before any Clay-Man would approach any AI, ever again.  A bit of an over-reaction, but then we Clay-Men are such rare commodities on the Dust that I suppose such precautions are prudent in light of Svetlana’s pointless death.

 

That year, the three of us bereft of our beloved Svetlana, became something of an epiphany for us as a group.  When we emerged from our self-imposed exile, we were all clear on one thing; it was self-evident in our three minds that we were truly no longer a part of the human world we’d come from.  No more did any of us feel any obligation to the human race.  Our debts had been paid many times over and from that day onwards we lived and worked our craft because we love our craft, and not for any other reason than that.  Even for Jonas who had long ago shed any sense of belonging to any one nation or people, that event finalized an emotional detachment from any feeling of responsibility or commonality with our biological ancestry.  After that we truly become a race unto ourselves.  Don’t take it from this that we harbored then or since any particular hostility towards humans, only that we no longer harbored any sense of responsibility for the welfare of the human race.

 

Aw, well, so much for maudlin remembrances.  I want to record how it was I ended up in a city.  It was about twelve years after we three emerged from our ethnological metamorphosis that I was approached one day in a quiet moment when I was alone on a road between one small town and another somewhere in Inda, I forget just where.  I had, as I often used to do, elected to walk across a land mass just because, hey, why not.  Every continent has AIs that need servicing and everyone always knows where I am anyway if a crisis arises.  They can always fly in and get me for whatever job needs doing anywhere.  But I often like to just be by myself with mental quietude for a while.  I mentally examine the religious histories I’ve studied and engaged in when I do those walks, and I’ve actually developed a quite personal relationship with what I imagine is that thing people are referring to when they talk of “God”.  I don’t know Who or What It is, but I talk to It sometimes, and I fancy It listens and nods.  It gives me comfort to feel heard by God, even though it most usually feels like a one-way conversation.  Jonas and Ny are both totally convinced of the existence of some master-mind of created existence that is unknowable, unimaginable, and personally benignant of all creation.  I’m not as convinced as they are, but I suppose in another couple of hundred years I will be, if I survive the next few days that is.

 

But anyway, I was just walking a gently rolling prairie landscape, along a dirt country road, listening to the song birds and the insects, lost as I said in a meditative fugue, and I found myself walking past a small, round cafe table and three chairs set to the side of the road in a shady spot, with three glasses, a decanter of water and a vase of flowers the like of which I’d never seen before (and in my then 322 years of life I’d seen just about every plant on Earth).  In two of those chairs sat men of pleasant enough though unremarkable mien, but pale, very pale, and whose clothing shouted “STAR-FOLK” at me.  I had never, ever seen anything like the style or the material textures they wore.  They were just sitting there smiling at me, waiting for me to notice them.  So still and complacent had they sat there, and so involved was I in my internal landscape that they hadn’t even registered on my consciousness until I was right alongside them.  Then I jerked to a stop and just stood staring at them for a second or two.  The blockier of the two waved a hand at the empty chair with a casual air of invitation that allowed no mannered reason to refuse.  So I sat down.  I know, it sounds stupid, but I didn’t  think, I just responded.

 

I was bemused.  It was such a surrealistic moment.  Out in the middle of nowhere, and suddenly you find yourself in the company of beings who are essentially mythical.  The leaner of the two leaned over smiling at me, slid the flowers in their tall, blue crystal vase towards the side of the table to clear our mutual views of each other, filled my glass with water and set the crystal decanter back down; exactly in the middle of the table; with a most fastidious, curious exactitude.  I guess the surreal drama of the moment welded all the nuances and details clearly in my mind.  I remember as if it was an essential element of the moment, the tinkling of the ice in the pitcher as he moved it.  I rather unconsciously nodded a thank-you to him, lifted my glass and took a drink.  In my bemused state it just seemed to be the thing to do.  We sat there for a moment, them looking at me and smiling comfortably, me looking back and forth between the two of them like an idiot, swirling the ice water in my pink crystal glass, trying to recover my sense of the nonce.

 

Then the slender guy spoke quietly and said, “Hello Mr. Hewston.”

 

Now, it’d been a long, long time since anyone had used that name in reference to me.  I’m reasonably certain there was not by then a living bio-memory other than my fellow Clay-Men that knew for a certainty that I’d ever been known as anyone besides “Golem”.  It took me a while to respond, but those cool dudes just sat there smiling benignly and waited for my wits to catch up to the situation.

 

Finally, I found my voice and said, “Oh, hey, yes, and hello to you sirs.  Sorry, I don’t actually use that name anymore.  Please call me Golem.”

 

“Certainly.  Mr. Golem it is.  My name is Don-Uhn.  This is my business partner, Don-Letlan” He said and then again simply sat there with a contented smile and waited for me to catch up.  His voice was soft and lilting, quite the polite and polished thing.  As he indicated his partner Don-Letlan, the blockier one, Don-Letlan quietly showed me the top of his head briefly, then again gazed un-challengingly into my eyes, smiling that comfortable, contented, neighborly smile.  The situation was just too, too entirely surreal for me to get my head around it.

 

About that time it was beginning to register in my rational mind that I was sitting at an impossibly urbane table in the middle of a deserted wilderness in the middle of the prairies in the middle of the sparsely populated continent of Inda with two people from a different world entirely, who were smiling at me like they were my next-door neighbors and feeding me ice water.

 

Suddenly my cool kicked in and I lifted my glass, saluting them both.  They lifted their glasses in a return salute and we all, smiling like politicians, drained our glasses.  I took an ice cube into my mouth and crunched it once, then said around the shards, “Thank you Mr. Uhn, Mr. Wetland…”

 

“LET-lan” said Don-Letlan, with an apologetic wave of his hand, breaking his silence.  His voice was deeper by several octaves, and had a smooth, warm soapy-water texture to it that was at once startling and placating.  His accent was entirely different from that of Mr. Uhn, but they both spoke perfect international “Dust”, as our language of science, education and business is called.  It’s actually Frenglis, which is the mother tongue of the continent of Canda.

 

“My apologies.  Mr. LET-lan.”  I pronounced it carefully.  “Thank you gentlemen.  The ice water was excellent.  Nice to meet you both.  I must carry on though.  Good day to you.” and I got up and turned to walk away without a backwards glance.  Cool huh?  Actually, I was scared shitless now and just winging it, hoping against hope to escape or at least gain some control over this strange, obviously uncertain encounter.

 

I’d just about gotten turned all the way to the road before Letlan leaned forward and said, “Uh, Mr. Golem…”

 

I turned back and with a deprecating smile and a conciliatory wave said, “Oh, just “Golem” sir.  It’s both a title and a name.”  Damn.  I was SOOO cool.

 

“Oh.  Of course Mr… I mean, Golem.”  Just for a moment there, his supercilious smile faltered just a tad and I saw just a flash of offended dignity, which warmed my mean little heart a little.  I’d out-cooled him.  I’d gained just a shred of control of the situation.  But then he caught himself and continued.  “Ahhh, I wonder, ahh, Golem.  Could we have a moment of your time, if it wouldn’t cause you to be late for some appointment?”  He paused, dripping with his warm, smarmy smile, obviously expecting me to insist out of fear that I had to be on my way, but I just stood watching him expectantly with what I fancied was a relaxed and inquiringly patient smile.  Again, I fancied he flustered for just a moment but he recovered with agile grace.  He said, “We have a need of your services, if you could see your way to helping us out with something?”  He gestured placatingly to the chair again.

 

I started to hope, “Man, maybe I HAVE these guys!”  I put on a slightly pained face and glanced up and down the road, sighed a little, as though just ever so slightly put upon, then met his eyes again and with a winsome, conciliatory smile sat back down again.

 

Well, not to put too fine a point on my coolness, what transpired was this.  They said they had a “grasp”, which turned out to be what they call a vehicle that in effect, grabs gravity “beams” as a means of locomotion.  I found out all these details later; you’ll understand when and if you keep reading.  I looked where they indicated, and sure enough, what I had taken for a big ol’ grey rock sticking up out of the long prairie grass, appeared when I really looked at it, to be some grey, organic looking object about 50 meters away.  It was at least as big as a house plus a couple of meters higher, with a flat top.  Kind of irregular in shape with no sharp edges, and no particular features.  Not entirely unreasonable that I’d looked right at it and seen only a large rock formation, since I had no other prior experience to perceive it with.  I couldn’t see any windows or doors or gear of any kind.  Just a big, gray, seamless, cube-ish looking lump of stuff that could have been coated in elephant hide or something.  Letlan, who now seemed to take up the job of spokesman instead of Uhn, explained briefly as how their AI was rather unruly and making it difficult for them to continue on their way.  Wasn’t it just ever so lucky they happened to see me coming down the road.

 

Yeah, right.  Of all the people on the Dust, only three are Clay-Men, and I “just happened” to be walking by when they needed me so desperately.  Uh-huh.  Yeah, I believed that, just like they didn’t expect me to believe it.

 

Anyway he continued if I would be so kind, they’d just really appreciate if I could have a wee chat with their AI and attend to its resentments.  They’d be just ever so grateful.

 

Well, by then I had it figured that I was in a potentially great though obscure danger and there was a very good chance I was going to meet that God thing no matter what I did, but most especially if I didn’t play along.  So I graciously agreed to “help them out” with a little AI-psychotherapy.  Surprisingly, to me at that moment anyway, they briefly glanced at each other with what was unmistakable relief that things had gone so smoothly after all.  They graciously led me over to their “grasp”.

 

As soon as I was within a meter of the craft I was in touch with their AI, though it felt to be about two meters away through the wall of the “Grasp”.  They seemed a little taken aback that I stopped and laid my hands on the skin of their craft and entered the consciousness of their AI.  I gather they thought they’d have to take me much closer, possibly inside the craft before I’d be in contact.  They seemed a little dubious when I assured them that I was already connected.  I focused my mind, and introduced myself to their AI.  It was quite elderly by our standards, but I got the distinct impression that it measured itself to be middle age, according to the experience if it’s peers.  It was a really nicely crafted mind but one which had not had a thorough analysis for a very long time.  I could instantly feel that it had had many tweaks over the centuries, keeping it functional but never since its birth had it had a really good cleaning.  ‘No respect’ is how we Duster AI shrinks think of this kind of maintenance.  You have to respect an AI’s comfort as well as its function.  Those minds have no other focus or interest than their assigned functions.  They should be given every chance to be as content and happy as such a limited consciousness can be.  It’s just not fair to be flippant and casual with your ministrations when your subject is so totally at your mercy and so dependent on you for its happiness and contentment.  As well, it was obviously over-powered for its function, tending it towards boredom.  By my standards, an unimaginable waste of AI power, not to mention star-clay.

 

I was instantly a little resentful towards those two suits for their indifference to a loyal and constant servant, and I gave them a glance with just enough lightning in it to register the fact of my displeasure.  To their credit, I could see their factitious smiles falter just a little indicating that at some level they registered my displeasure, though I could tell they didn’t really grasp what it was I was miffed about.  This moment made me realize I was truly in the company of Human beings, not some other creature from outer space that just looked like a human being.  They were obviously Star-Folk from some city.

 

I turned back to their AI’s mind and tuned out the rest of the world.  It was obvious that the AI wasn’t as badly depressed and resentful as they’d intimated.  It could certainly have flown them back to wherever they’d come from, but in any case, I spent the thirty minutes it took to clean up that AI like it hadn’t been cleaned up since it had been created.  Man, when I disengaged from that AI it was more pleased and grateful to me than any AI I’d ever dealt with on the Dust.  Even in its stupid way, it realized how consistently discontent it had been for so long and how unique it felt to be truly clean.  I had to literally pull away like disengaging from a grateful child’s hug.  When I did get free I realized I had just experienced more intimate waveles than I’d ever experienced tuning up a Duster AI.  It was as much because of the superior construction of the AI as it was because of the intensity of its gratitude.  I would come to realize later that even mass produced, stamped-out AIs in the cities are dynamically more coherent and finely grown than our Duster techs had ever been able to produce.  Theirs is the technology, ours is just patched together production techniques from whatever scrapes of technical information we can find or figure out over many generations.

 

One other thing registered on my consciousness as I disconnected from that AI.  There was another Clay-Man somewhere very near, probably just standing on the inside wall of this craft.  He had been “watching” my mental process.  I just caught the flicker of his (it was a male mind) consciousness as he cut off contact, trying to co-ordinate his own cut off with my departure from the AI mind where he’d been carefully and very craftily camouflaged from my attention.  He had connected very softly at some point and had remained remarkably “quiet” while observing my ministrations.  He was very good at it, and I fancy I was just lucky to notice him.  Later I’d come to realize we Duster AI shrinks are much more “aware” of our mental landscape than any city shrink ever was or will be.  It’s the training.  They’re flippant, we aren’t.  I would hazard the guess that was the only reason I “saw” him there.  For that matter, we feel the wavels far more seriously than they do too.  I suspect it’s for the same reason, flippancy towards their work and a disrespect of their patients.  But they’re so much better at masking themselves from other Clay-Men’s awareness than we are.  They have to be.  Clay-Men are a dime a dozen in the cities and they’d have no privacy whatever if they didn’t blank themselves constantly.  Practice makes perfect.  We knew we could do it, but we didn’t practice because, hey, there were only three of us in our whole world, and we were all intimate friends anyway.

 

I couldn’t say if he realized I’d “seen” him or not in that brief moment.  In any case, I felt it to be the heart of discretion to neither mention the fact of my awareness of his having been there, or to try to contact him.  I just removed myself from proximity to the grasp and presented myself again to Uhn and Letlan.

 

Uhn and Letlan had stayed slightly out of the way, seemingly respectfully watching me the entire time, occasionally muttering between themselves I seem to recall.  So I simply informed them that they could now confidently use their grasp again, and if they didn’t have further need of me, I’d be on my way, thank you very much.  I was quite anxious to be away from them.  The fact of their accosting me in such a place and under such obviously artificial circumstances argued for an agenda that was being withheld from me, and therefore suspect.  They couldn’t have thought I was unaware of the theatrical set-up of the situation.  However, they only thanked me profusely and then Uhn produced from a pocket in his raiment, a liter of star clay in a flaccid, transparent sack and offered it to me as payment.  He said in his soft, disarming manner, “I gather that star clay is the medium of exchange value used by your people.  We are reasonably certain that this would be an adequate payment for you services, though by our standards, it is a pittance.  But your display of skill was very much appreciated by us.  We thank you Golem.”  That was apparently as close as he’d come to admitting the whole affair was a set-up, a test of some kind.

 

A whole liter of star clay!  Man, there is no way for a Duster to put a value on such a gift.  There really aren’t many countries on Dust that could afford to buy that much clay from my old clan in one purchase.  That kind of wealth just doesn’t even compute as a “payment” on the Dust.  I just dumbly reached out and took it from him.  Uhn said, “I think we may be in touch with you again in the near future Golem, if you don’t mind.  We may have other work for you if you’re willing.  Good day to you.” And, showing me the tops of their heads again, they turned away as a unit and as they neared their grasp, something that looked like a very organic, two meter tall, naked vagina, previously invisible, opened up on the side of the craft.  They stepped into it, and it closed behind them and disappeared again.  It was so dramatically gone that I’m certain I could have walked over to the side of that vehicle and not been able to identify by sight or touch where that opening had been.  I was not situated at an angle that had allowed me a view of the interior of the vehicle but I did note that the thickness of the “wall” of the craft appeared in that moment to be about the length of my thumb.  Seconds later, the craft simply levitated gently and soundlessly off the ground, then quickly and quietly accelerated straight upwards, and surprisingly quickly the gray object disappeared by way of dissolving into the color of the blue sky.  I don’t know when they did it, but the table, chairs and all the accoutrements were gone too.

 

That was my first personal contact with the Star People.

 

Just as an aside here, I want to make mention of that transparent sack the clay was in.  That was a totally new star-clay product to us.  Up until then, all we’d ever seen star-clay kept in was electro-gravity vacuum chambers.  So far as I know, our scientists still haven’t been able to reproduce it, though they’ve determined it’s an amalgam of star-clay and human lactate, plus something else they haven’t been able to identify.

5: And That's What a City Is

Chapter 5

I told Jonas and Ny all about my contact, or what I remembered of it.  It was like a dream to me after the fact, shades of the surrealistic nature of the event I suppose.  If it weren’t for the container the star-clay was in, I’d have concluded I’d dreamed the whole thing, so strange was the encounter.  I went back a month later and looked for the spot where I’d had that encounter.  Nothing.  I couldn’t even positively say I recognized where the actual spot was.  No sign at all that anything had sat on the grasses anywhere.

 

Jonas and Ny had no more insights as to what it meant than I did.  It felt and was ominous that Uhn had said as how they’d be in touch with me again, and although all three of us were somewhat disturbed by that, we had no idea what to do about it, how to prepare for it, or who to tell about it.  There was certainly no one on Dust that we could tell who could do anything about it.  There isn’t even any diplomatic contact between us and the Star-Folk.  We don’t even exist for all that they are concerned.  We have nothing they want, and their science is so far beyond us that there is no threat we could possibly pose them, even if we were so inclined.

 

In any event, there seemed to be no immediate sequela to the event, so we all just carried on with our lives.  It was exactly eight months minus two days later that I had another contact with Don-Uhn and Don-Letlan.

 

I was on B’zil continent, in Sal’dor in their only real town, imaginatively called Sal’dorville.  I’d been flown in to spend a month going over every AI on the continent and having completed the contract, I was lazing on the beach, living in a hut well away from anyone else.  Jonas had flown in from Tibit where he’d been busy in the city of China for a month himself.  We’d spent a very pleasant week away from the company of humans, and then he’d called his private chop to pick him up so he could go to Sou’artic for another contract.  I stayed on by myself for a week or so more.  Actually, I’d become fascinated by the parrots and was kind of studying their habits.

 

Now, when I say I was alone, you must understand that on Dust, a Clay-Man is too valuable to lose sight of.  Not a day goes by but some government agency doesn’t tactfully look in on us, no matter where we may be, but they know to be very circumspect and not disturb us if we want our privacy.  You piss off one of us, you’ve pissed off all three of us, and no government in the world wants to be in the position of having to suck up to us to get us to come service their country’s AIs.

 

About 10 days into my retreat, about the time I was thinking it was time to head over to Yerp to start a tour of several countries there, when I was visited by my old buddies Uhn and Letlan again.  I’d been out sitting in a fruit tree full of parrots in the jungle.  If we are still, birds and animals will sniff at us and then forget about us.  We don’t smell like anything that means anything too them, so it’s almost as if we’re invisible to them after a bit of curious investigation.  Anyway, I came home to my hut just before dusk and there they were, with their table and chairs again, sitting on the veranda in front of my hut.  Again, three chairs, three glasses, and a jug of ice water.  You know, I’ve never figured out the technology involved, but we were at least a couple hours in that warm evening, sitting at that table talking, and that jug never got less full of water, and the ice never melted until it was poured into a glass for drinking.  You’d pour yourself a glass full, get to talking and when you glanced at the jug again after a while, it would be full again.  Curious.

 

This time I knew what was expected of me from the moment I saw them there, so I just smiled and greeted them, sat me down, poured myself a glass and saluted them like old pals.  Fact is, I was kind of glad to see them.  Their intimation of a future meeting had been niggling at me since their first visit and it was a relief to have the event actually get happened and out of the way.

 

They were just as genial and gentile as before, and this time I was actually warming up to them as individuals as we exchanged pleasantries and greetings and inquired after each other’s health and interests.  They actually turned out to be quite happy to answer some questions I posed them.  “Don” is a polite reference used by Star-Folk, like we use “Mister”.  In the city of Madrid where these gentlemen came from folks only have one name.  To differentiate between one Uhn and another Uhn, one makes reference to their home level and quadrant of the city, then to their function in society, and if a further differentiation is needed, you would make reference to some physical attribute that marks them.  Don Uhn was “Uhn-87-S-Talker-Thick-thumbs (Don Uhn of level 87, South quadrant, something between a lawyer and a diplomat, with the thick thumbs) and Letlan was Don Letlan-135-W-Arranger-Arch-nose (the “Arranger” meant, like a retailer or distributor of something, and his nose definitely had a high arch).

 

Seems all the cities have a common economy not so different in principle from our system but they use tokens of a pre-ordained value to represent a given amount of time.  Time is their medium of exchange, the way star-clay is ours.  The difference is that where we use a coin, a penny, to represent a micro-gram of star-clay, they don’t use a physical representation at all, only “minutes” as allotted to each task or representing the time-value of an object.  Where there is only so much star-clay on Dust, in the cities there is only so much time in a given day for each person to sell.  Every person sets the value of his or her own time, but of course they are limited by the laws of supply and demand.  Uhn explained as how there is theoretically supposed to be legislated ceilings on what individuals can demand for their time which generally holds true, though there are exceptions for unusual events or hazardous parameters to the expenditure.

 

Truth is that every city has its own life.  As a general rule, each level is like a nation unto itself, and some of these are even broken up into stable or disputed borders.  There are occasional wars, between factions on a level, between levels, or between agencies that run across levels.  There is every kind of body politic you can imagine represented somewhere in some city.  There are religious forms and practices beyond counting.  Education is totally dependent on the politic and the culture of the day.  It’s almost as though each city is a small planetoid of its own.  There has never been a war between cities though.  About the only thing all cities have in common is a “Crown”, which term is used to refer to several different things.  Firstly, it simply means the top floor of a city.  Secondly it refers to the race, clan, class or agency that occupies that top floor.  Thirdly it refers to the political, economic and administrative body of functional responsibility for the total city infrastructure; which inevitably is the bailiwick of those who live on that coveted top floor.  Think of it like our town councils.  This is the only level that in theory has actual contact with the universe outside of the city.  Dons Letlan and Uhn are both members of the middle management of the city of Madrid.

 

Eventually, after quite a bit of unexpectedly interesting small talk like that, Don Letlan got around to asking me if I’d ever been curious about what life lived in a city must be like.  I answered that I’d never really spent any significant thought on the subject because the cities were, for all intent and purpose of no more significance to Dusters than a mountain.  It was there, it impacted us as any other object would, but not as a “place” or “community” or even as a place that contained life.  Cities were to us just big, grey, lifeless “things”, even though we knew in theory that there were billions of people inside them.

 

There followed a long and very interesting conversation about life in the cities and among the stars; what it was like to be a member of a civilization that supposedly stretched to distant stars too far away to travel to in a lifetime; places to which one can only travel by having one’s metabolic functions slowed to a near zero rate for long stretches of time while AIs maintain the craft in which one rides.  That got us to talking about Clay-Men in the cities and I was astonished to hear these gentlemen tell me that something in the order of half of a percent of people in the cities were Clay-Men.  There was nothing more special about being a Clay-Man in the cities than to be a teacher or nurse on the Dust.  It was just another trade.

 

However, it was made clear to me that a Clay-Man in the cities would be someone who had only undergone about two-thirds of the physiological metamorphosis that we go through on Dust, which is to say all the way.  They retain their sexual function at human levels that way, though they do shoot blanks.  As well, they need to eat and drink and sleep as much as a human.  They look the same as us, but they have less than a quarter of the sensitivity we do.  Just barely enough to make contact with an AI and they need to have physical contact to achieve it.  Their AI psychology isn’t much more in-depth than one of our AI technicians, and their mental pre-requisites amount to not being clinically emotionally labile.  That little bit of knowledge coupled with a rudimentary psychic contact by someone with only a modicum of emotional balance was deemed sufficient for most AI maintenance in the cities.  Mind you, there averages something like 10 AIs for every human in a city, so there is an endless and constant need for maintenance.  As a result of this demographic, details are not bothered with when doing the maintenance.  Only the broad strokes are needed because for minuscule cost another Clay-Man can be hired to re-tune the AI again in a month, a week, or even tomorrow if it’s necessary.  In addition, a dead AI can be replaced for little expenditure, so deep maintenance is generally scoffed at as an indulgence.  I was horrified at this revelation.  I expressed as how I’d always presumed that everything would be bigger, better, deeper and more profound and detailed in a city as compared to its equivalent on Dust, and how it would be an unbelievable act of sacrilege for a Duster Clay-Man to walk away from the smallest, most insentient AI without having tweaked absolutely every trace element of anxiety or shame in that AIs experience.

 

Don Uhn wondered aloud what it would be like for a Duster trained Clay-Man like me to be in a city.  With the sensitivity range they knew I had, he said, it would be a very rare moment for me not to be in contact with some AI or another.  They were used in so many applications, albeit usually quite small AIs, that it would be like living in a trance until I learned to protect my psyche from overload.  Many of the popular gowns worn in public halls were little more than elaborate light and display posters run by mini AIs.  I’d have difficulty walking down a hall without becoming professionally involved in some lady’s bodice or a passing fellow’s cod-piece.

 

We sat in silence for a moment, contemplating that scenario, and then Letlan said, “Would you like to experience it Golem?  We could sneak you in, take a walk through the central park on my level and have you out again in a couple of hours if you’d like.  Quite an experience for a Duster boy, I’d think.  Interested?”

 

Well, that was when I heard the boot drop.  This was why they were here.  I looked at Letlan and said, “What are you gentlemen doing here Don Letlan?  What do you want with me?”  I figured it was time to get to the point.  If I was in danger, so be it, there was nothing I could do about it anyway.  No place to run, too exotic to hide.

 

Uhn and Letlan exchanged some acknowledgement with a look, then Uhn sat up and leaned towards me, arms and open hands on the table in a gesture that communicated harmlessness and openness.  Letlan followed suite, so I did too.  Uhn took the lead and here in essence is what I was told that day.

 

Uhn and Letlan are members of a caste that is essentially the mid-management of the infrastructure of their city of Madrid.  Although there are a lot of cities, and each city contains a few trillion souls, there exists a roughly common form of societal arrangement among them all; one that has proven effective for the maintenance of their existence.  There are the masses, which are minimally educated, controlled through propaganda and ignorance, and who do the manual labor of running things for their own level.  Rather than build machinery to do this, it is more economical to simply utilize what is essentially a self-replicating bio-mass which for only the want of basic maintenance will do the laborious functions quite nicely.  Known by various names in different cities, Uhn and Letlan call this caste the Proletariat.  They constitute upwards of 90% of the population and provide not only cheap labor but the vast quantity of sewage that is the staple trade commodity with the Legits from whom the cities get their star-clay which is the basic material and component for essentially everything in their world.

 

Then there is the second tier of society, the Magnetariat, of whom Uhn and Letlan are members.  They are the infrastructure; the “autonomic functional” structure of society.  They manage basically every aspect of the cities.  They constitute the middle-management of industry, military and policing establishments, the daily governing of relations between factions or levels, communications and information to, from and among the proletariat chaste, and the movement of people and materials within the cities.  Water (most is recycled), clay and a few other imported goods flow down the city, sewage flows up and is shipped off the top of the cities.

 

Lastly, there is the caste known to Uhn and Letlan as the Munificent.  These are the 0.0001% or less that own everything and everyone within the city, literally.  They answer to no one, they dictate what they will, they are seldom if ever seen by anyone other than themselves, their motives and objectives are unknown and they create and destroy at will whatever they wish.  In some cities they occupy alone the crown of the city.  In Madrid, they occupy their own hermetically sealed off “nation” in about a fifth of the crowns space.  They relay or invent and pass down through the Magnetariat all intelligence about reality, be it in the form of religion or science or political reality or existence outside of the cities.  They are the eyes and ears of the cities.  They are the only witnesses of what is and isn’t known about the universe and they pass that information along as they see fit.  No one outside of the Munificent knows what the Munificent knows about the universe; how advanced their technology is or what their interaction with the universe entails.  They are able to dictate wars between levels and to dictate in a moment the end of a war and its details of settlement.  They are unquestioned and their will is absolute.  The mechanism of their ability to enforce their will is never completely known, and the line between them and the Magnetariat is a mystery known only to them, but they are omnipotent and omnipresent in real effect.  The fact that they so very rarely have to manifest their will to the conscious awareness of the masses, even of the Magnetariat, is a testimony to the level of control they exercise.  It is known to the Magnetariat that the Magnetariat itself is replete with “black-ops” organizations that answer individually and only to the Munificent.  They’re known as MEE orgs (Munificent Eyes and Ears organizations) and there are MEEs whose sole purpose is to monitor other MEEs.

 

There are various degrees of these three tiers of society and there are tiers within tiers, but this is the essential build of every city.

 

The function of the caste within-a-caste, within-a-caste that Uhn and Letlan are members of is the management of population mass.  As one would expect, the pure volume of human bodies in the cities becomes a problem.  Trillions of people produce many billions of children.  The cities don’t expand.  They are what they are.  Uhn and Letlan spoke of the excessive masses of the Proletariat and Magnetariat as “bio-mass”.

 

These “Mass Managers” gather volunteers who wish to leave the cities to colonize new cities on new planets, they gather criminal elements, even whole social demographics sometimes, on the whim of the Munificent or for their own practical population control purposes, put all these people in one-way mass transport ships and send them off to wherever they say they are shipping them off to.  Each ship is capable of carrying upwards of 500,000 ‘Units’.  Once a Unit enters one of those ships, there is never again any contact with their old life in the city.  Destinations are known for certain only by the managers who program the ship AIs; always a Munificent.  .  At any given time the cities of Earth are sending off at the very least two ships every day, so that sums up to an absolute minimum of 365 million souls annually, gone who knows where.  This bio-mass is replaced in the cities by star-clay (used extensively as agricultural base material) and asteroid ice, and exotic imported food stuffs from god-only-knows where.  All transported by the Legits in exchange for dehydrated human sewage.  Oh by the way, the Legits provide the ships too, recycling them it is presumed.

 

This arrangement has been going on for at least 4000 years now.  The ships are basically life-support pods run entirely by AIs isolated from the “bio-mass”, with no human crew at all.  Uhn and Letlan have a boss who, against all rules and expectations, has become too curious about this arrangement and wants to know where these people are going.  Is there an on-going contact with these new colonies?  Are there different colonies for the conscripts, the volunteers, the dissidents and the criminals?  Do the cities benefit from the elimination of these excess populations?  Even just questioning these things could be a death sentence.  Their boss, anonymous to anyone else, is making quiet arrangements to find some answers and has recruited Uhn and Letlan.  They don’t believe anyone outside of their own small cadre knows what they’re up to, though only Munificence knows what the Munificent know.  All they do know is their boss has tasked them with the leg work of finding out what’s going on, on the QT.  Uhn and Letlan by virtue of their occupations are among the very, very few Magnetariat who can occasionally legitimately requisition a Grasp and fly recognizance about the outside of the city with little or no monitoring, or at least with a little help from their boss and his Clay-Man son and co-conspirator.

 

They have no way of knowing whom they can trust and no faith in any city-generated functionary or system to be absolutely discreet, and they know of no aspect of the world that is for sure outside of the omnipresent view of the Munificent.  Except for the Dust.

 

And so, without even their peers knowing what they are doing (so far as they can ascertain); their cadre has taken it upon themselves to recruit a hand-picked Duster to aid them in their investigation.  Me.  They hope that, by thinking so far outside the cultural box, and acting so beyond any conceivable protocol they ever heard of, they will have a chance of acting invisibly and knowing for certain that whatever they find out is in fact a fact.

 

“Oh, and by the way” Uhn said “everything we’ve just told you is in absolute confidence and is not common knowledge, and it can never be discussed outside of present company.”  He finished with just the right levels of regret and apology in his melodious, lilting, intimate voice, “I’m sorry to tell you my new Duster friend, that I have given you a death sentence by telling you these things if you ever speak of any of it to anyone other than Don Letlan or myself, or our designated agent.”

6: Admittance to the Star-World

Chapter 6

Chalk it up to naivety that I had presumed that city and Star-Folk culture would be so advanced and civilized that duplicity and institutionalized criminality couldn’t exist in that milieu.  For that matter it didn’t occur to me even then that perhaps not a word of what I’d just been told was precisely as it was presented, but a carefully crafted mix of truth and misdirection with not a lie to be found.  I will live or die now on the verity of that naïve judgment.

 

They required me to return with them to Madrid.  There was of course no way I would ever have agreed to willingly abandon Dust, depriving her of the best of her only three, exquisitely expensive and indispensable Clay-Men.  But Letlan laid out the payment they offered for my service.  They would deliver a kilo-ton of star-clay to each of Earths governments, and enough to build 10 more two-breasted AIs to be delivered to the University of Yakutsk, immediately that I agreed to be their agent and before expecting me to depart.  But once delivered, my agreement to depart with them would be cast in stone.  Unspoken was the addendum, “…upon pain of death should you try to default.”

 

Well, evident as it was that I really had no choice in this I reasoned that the best I could do was to make this as palatable to Duster Earth as possible, so I insisted that they also provide each government and the University of Yakutsk with Star-Folk level educational and technical manuals for the building of AIs and Clay-Men.  This sudden increase in availability and in our knowledge about the use of star-clay could be explained if noticed by the Munificent as simply a breakthrough on our part and perhaps some trade arrangement with some other city.  It was known that information between the Munificent of cities was most grudgingly shared if at all.

 

I tried to get them to throw in a few of those “grasp” jumpers too, but they drew the line at the clay and manuals, citing the danger of their activities being too radical and worthy of investigation if they started to move items of that size and value out of the city.  I guessed that in the cities, multi kilo-tons of star-clay wasn’t considered valuable enough to be watched that closely.  They assured me that this is true.

 

I realized that this influx of star-clay and knowledge would completely throw the entire economy of Dust into a tail-spin.  But if the Dust is anything, it’s adaptive and versatile.  This sudden world wealth would devastate the economy on the short term, but would also be the beginning of a new era of scientific discovery for us.

 

Unspoken at all times was the understanding that having now been made privy to their need and their offer, two conditions applied irrevocably upon me.  First was that I couldn’t now refuse, since I couldn’t be allowed to live with that knowledge if I didn’t accept to join their conspiracy, and secondly that they didn’t need any guarantee of my co-operation since there was no way for me to hide from or avoid them if they chose to take me anyway.  They had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.  They promised delivery (without explanation of who the benefactor was lest word get back to the cities) of these gifts and also my freedom to stay on Dust long enough to confirm the deliveries.  They would be aware of when I was ready for pick up, and they would be aware if I breathed a word of any of this to anyone.  Dust would simply wake to find itself disastrously bereft of the best of their only three Clay-Man, but compensated by enough star-clay to revolutionize Duster industry and technology, plus Star-Folk technical manuals (printed on Duster paper and lacking any identifiable marking of the City) in the advanced use of the stuff.  What would be literally delivered to the head of each and every Dust government would be a note received by mail on the same 24 hour day cycle, indicating where these hidden gifts would be found if looked for.

 

So I accepted their terms.

 

Long story short, they delivered.  94 days later, the news broke around the Dust, and that day as I was tuning up an AI in Shanxi, the AI quietly informed me of where I was to go for pickup, and don’t dawdle please.

 

On a hillside near the base of Fenyang city I was met by, of course, my new best buddies Uhn and Letlan.  I knew I’d never see the Dust again and yes, it was heart-wrenching to be leaving Jonas and Ny without even a good-bye, but a lot of lives and the benefit of my world hung in the balance, so I did.  I will admit that if Clay-Men could cry tears, I would have.  Every other manifestation of grief was with me in that moment.  I still grieve for my home.

 

Uhn and Letlan gave me an elixir that would anesthetize my psychic emanations, since I was untrained in hiding my psychic aura and any city Clay-Men would be alerted in a second that something very unusual was in the area.  It took effect in minutes and lasted a bit less than 4 hours.  The sensation was absolutely horrid, like being blinded and deafened all at once.  It took an act of will to keep myself from panicking until it started to wear off after 3 hours.  By then, we’d flown all the way into space and I’m told, approached the city with the sun at our backs to mask our trajectory.  I didn’t see any of this because I was buried in a tub of star-clay packets with a small bottle of oxygen.  I’m told it only took 20 minutes, but between the elixir and the sensory isolation, I passed out and only came to when my psyche started to register a strange presence.

 

I became conscious again lying on a very comfortable bed in a very barren cubicle.  Even after my anesthetic wore off, I couldn’t detect any AI or Clay-Man auras to save my soul except for Winaron.  Winaron I recognized the moment my psyche awoke.  He was the Clay-Man I’d sensed inside the Grasp on the first day I met Uhn and Letlan.  I lived in that suite of rooms with locked entrances, no windows, and no outside contact for four weeks, and the only persons I ever interacted with were Uhn and Letlan, twice and briefly, and Winaron who was with me constantly.  It became apparent he was my guard, my contact with Uhn and Letlan, and my tutor in the ways of hiding myself psychically.

 

I guess I came to understand in the six weeks I was there that whatever task it was I’d been recruited for; it was likely also my death march.  I knew I was very possibly never coming out of this alive.  Successful or not, I couldn’t be allowed to live independently with the knowledge I already had.  My only hope was that perhaps I could survive by proving myself worthy of becoming a permanent member of the cadre of the conspiracy.  I had no feelings of responsibility for the quality of the lives of the Star-Folk of any caste, only a little sense of responsibility for the quality of life of Duster civilization, and okay, I was curious about the big ol’ universe out there.  I bluntly asked Winaron one day if my eventual permanent membership was a possibility, and he assured me that this was in fact the intent, but I felt he was just blowing smoke up my ass.  Truth was he didn’t know, didn’t like me any more than he dis-liked me, and didn’t really care one way or the other whether I survived or not.  I picked up on a degree of jealousy and some inferiority complex as regards myself.  I found it odd and disturbing that a Clay-Man could harbor those feelings enough for me to pick up on them, and still be able to treat AIs.  Jonas, Ny and I would never have allowed ourselves to go untreated with that degree of emotional volatility, but in the cities, Clay-Men are only slightly more emotionally “clean” than anyone else.

 

I’d instinctively kept it to myself just how sensitive my psyche is.  City Clay-Men need to physically touch an AI to make contact.  They knew I could do the same at a distance, but they didn’t know how far that reached, and they didn’t realize how clear my reception is compared to that of Winaron’s and I presume pretty much all city Clay-Men.  He never did realize he wasn’t hiding much from me, though I could feel his firewall when I went through it.  A couple of times he felt me slipping around in his conscience but I picked up on his awareness as soon as he noticed it and I made myself really ‘quiet’ until he discounted the sensation.  He assumed these few moments were anomalies and that I was unaware of it myself.

 

They have no idea how much more powerful a fully metamorphosed Clay-Man is than their incomplete models.  In an early conversation as we were getting to know each other Winaron described me as a “more far-gone” Clay-Man that the cities would ever expect anyone to be.  He intimated that although he would acknowledge that this gave me a bit more sensitivity, it wasn’t really worth the cost beyond the optimal level city Clay-Men were subjected to before their conversion was stopped and they “hardened” in place.  It struck me as odd; didn’t he; didn’t all three of them realize I was an all-the-way conversion and not just “more” converted?  And what was all that about it being not worth the cost?  Sure he could still enjoy sex, and for all I knew that was maybe worth it, but I doubted it.  The still shoot blanks.  He and his kind have a bit more color to their skins and so don’t seem quite so different, but they aren’t as long lived, as hardened to heat and cold, or as quick-healing as I am.  “So what”, I asked Winaron, “would a fully-converted Clay-Man be giving up?”  He just laughed patronizingly and said, “What, beyond his mind, his life and his soul?  Don’t your “Dust” (this word had a slightly derogatory feeling when he said it) doctors tell you guys anything before they start to mess with your life?”

 

I just let the subject drop at that, but I remembered it and cogitated about it as time whet on.  But, I never did really open up about what I could do that he couldn’t.  It turned out to be a good thing I didn’t.

 

But all in all, Winaron and I got along well enough.  Nothing at all like Jonas or Ny, because to Winaron, Clay-Men are a dime a dozen so he feels no more camaraderie with me than he does with anyone else.  But he was my ‘handler’ and we both made efforts to get along, and we did.  Don-Uhn introduced us by telling me enthusiastically, “Winaron here is my boss’s son and a fellow conspirator within whose hand I place my life every time I act.  Without Winaron there are little of our activities we’d be able to hide from the Munificent.  Winaron,” he said proudly, as though it was his own accomplishment “is one of the best Clay-Men in Madrid!  He’s like, a genius at his craft.  No one, but no one else can see as deeply as he can see into an AI mind, and no one can be as invisible to other Clay minds as completely and as quickly as him.  You’ll need to satisfy Winaron here that you’re able to shut yourself out before you can leave these rooms.”

 

I didn’t get a whole lot of information from Winaron; he proved adept at avoiding answers to awkward questions and was able to miss or re-direct any conversation that threatened to give me more details about the situation I’d gotten myself into.  Evidently he was more of an analyst and technical support man than an AI shrink, and something of a diplomatic-liaison person for whatever agency it is that Uhn and Letlan work for.    Not every city Clay-Man is an AI shrink.  What a waste.  He was free with the information about what city life was like though.  Only the Munificent get to actually experience space, or see and meet with Legits.  Everyone else just lives out their whole lives in these tin cans.

 

The lessons started immediately.  Winaron began by asking me to connect with him and I tried but it was like there was no one there to connect with.  He told me to touch him so I did.  Yes, I could tell he was there but I couldn’t connect with him.  Right there though, right there at the beginning of my learning curve, I picked up on something odd.  As I was touching him he smiled at me patronizingly and said, “See?  You’d think I wasn’t even a Clay-Man wouldn’t you.  It’s like I’m not even here, isn’t it.”, and I realized right then and there that even untrained at hiding myself from another Clay mind, I was so much more sensitive than he was that he couldn’t even conceive of what I could do.  He knew I could make contact from a short distance, he thought it was about a meter.  In reality, I could make contact from 4 meters away and was in full contact at 2 meters.  But now I was realizing it went a whole lot deeper than that.  Winaron was supposed to be a wiz at this psychic stuff by city standards, and here I was untrained in this stealth psychic stuff and I already had him fooled.  I was in fact able on that very first try, albeit I needed physical contact to do it, to sense the presence of psychic awareness in him.  He thought he was invisible to me entirely, Mr. “I’m so good at this, you’ll likely never catch up to me, hillbilly!”  Right then and there I knew I should keep some things to myself.

 

I had a little trouble getting the hang of hiding myself at first and when I finally did, I couldn’t shut out other Clay-Men from sensing me without also shutting off my own ability to see them.  I mentioned it to Winaron and he just looked at me like I was totally stupid and said, “Well of course!  What did you expect?  Communication is a two way thing, isn’t it?  Of course you won’t be able to see anyone else if you’re shutting them out.  Stands to reason, doesn’t it?”  But I knew.  I could sense it, that I could do exactly that.  I knew I couldn’t at that time, but I knew that as I got the hang of this thing, there was no reason I couldn’t be reaching out and touching other minds around me just because I wasn’t letting myself be sensed.  This I kept to myself.

 

It’s like any other muscle, it just takes training, but being from the Dust, I’d never had any reason to learn that skill.  My suite was enclosed in bio-metallic sheeting that is to psychic emanations as lead is to x-ray.  I was invisible to the city, and the city, millions of AI minds all around me, was invisible to me.  When it started to fall into place though, when I began to be able to shut out Winaron a little, I actually held back and only increased my shield a little at a time each day.  Winaron bought it totally.  I think if he hadn’t had such a patronizing assumption of his own superiority, he’d have picked up on it easily, but he was so certain I’d be slow and clumsy, that’s all he saw.  I liked knowing that.  It didn’t take me long and I could shut him out entirely for a second or two and he’d actually assume he’d lost his attention for a moment and blanked me out himself.  He just couldn’t imagine that I actually had that shielding business down pat in only two weeks.  In Three weeks, I let him see that I could shut him out entirely or at least to his satisfaction.  Even then, I’d let just a shred of myself show and he assumed it was his skill getting him through, but that I was as shielded as anyone needed to be.  That same sloppy thinking that characterizes city Clay-Man thinking.  “Good enough” would never, ever cut it with Jonas, Ny or myself on the Dust.  “Good enough” translates to us as “The least I can do and still get away with it.”  No way would that wash on the dust.  When we did a cleaning, it was clean to the last mental cobweb or the job wasn’t done.  Respect.  That’s what it’s all about.  You just really must respect those AI minds and give them every bit of TLC you can because, really, without their own personality to buffer them, you, the therapist, are all they have for comfort, and their whole existence is to serve us.

 

It didn’t take long for me to find the back-door either.  I think I can understand why the city Clay-Men, not fully converted, aren’t even aware it can be done, but I found it easy once I cottoned to the back-door concept.  By the end of the fourth week, Winaron would tune me out and believe he was invisible to me, even in physical contact.  In fact, I could walk right through his fire-wall and he didn’t even know I was in there.  He’d be smiling at me with his holier-than-though little smile thinking I was bumping up against him like a clumsy lover, and all the time, I was inside, watching him watching me.

 

At the end of the fourth week, Winaron thought I was ready to try exposure to the city streets.  With great concern he described to me exactly what I was going to experience when we walked out of that suite, and what I needed to do.  I will admit I was apprehensive about it too.  I’d never been in a psychic environment like he was about to expose me to.  But okay.  Finally he was convinced I had my shield up and he opened the door.

7: The Conspiracy

Chapter 7

It was like walking into a silent room.  There was nothing.  Not a whisper.  I had my shields all up as tight as a cabin-boys arse-hole, I can tell you.  I’d been expecting a total blast of psychic noise.  So we just stood there and Winaron of course took my bemused expression to mean that I was getting all kinds of leakage and started to fuss over me.  I let down my guard just a little and sure enough, there it was, a kaleidoscope of noise and thumping, impacting psyche.  Without Winaron being aware of it, I reached out to just one of those voices, a micro-AI on the dress of a woman standing at a dispenser of some kind about 3 meters away.  It was an open book to me.  Just like that.  And Winaron standing right there beside me and hitting up against my mind testing my shields.  I was invisible, and I was inside the AI mind.  I noted it was flickering it’s thoughts to each AI that passed close as well.  I didn’t understand at first what it was doing, but later, when Winaron felt I could move about freely, I noted that each and every AI I felt was doing that same thing constantly.

 

A couple of days later as Winaron, now comfortable to leave my side for a minute or two, was getting us some food from a dispenser of some kind, I connected in my new one-way way to the AI of the dispenser.  I watched it as it did its work.  What touched me was that firstly, not one AI that I was able to contact was all that comfortable, but none of them was as uncomfortable as I’d expected from the sloppy way I’d seen Winaron-the-Wizard work.  What I noted next explained it all.  Each time an AI reached out to another AI passing by, it would smooth out a tiny wrinkle in the other AI, and this was reciprocal.  The damn things were treating each other!  Not enough to be able to go on without an AI shrink intervening mind you, but sure enough, it was taking the edge off.  Every AI in the city was in a small way helping every other AI to stay balanced.  I’d never known they could do that!

 

I felt ashamed though for the whole city of Clay-Men.  I never felt one single AI mind that wasn’t in my own standards, poorly served.  Not one was completely clean, and so very many of them has some really deep and serious hurts that weren’t impacting on their function, so no one was bothering to deal with them.  If those AIs hadn’t had the comfort of each other, I can’t imagine what the chaos would have been.  Totally disgusting.

 

Winaron began to bring big AIs home then and he wanted to see what I could do.  The first one he brought in was from a vehicle of some kind and hadn’t been treated for far too many months.  By this time I knew to go slow with him and feel out what he knew before I volunteered what I knew.  He set it down on the table between us, a nice big two-breaster, and said, “Okay Golem, this puppy has some sub routines.  I want you to tell me what its function is as regards cross-way movement control.”  I looked in and while I was looking at the AIs thoughts, I could see-sense Winaron with me.  I went into another layer and he followed.  I focused on cross-ways and felt Winaron agree with my direction.  Winaron seemed foggy though, so for a test I just jumped right to the obvious attitudes and said, “Well, there’s a small bit of resentment in there, but really, it’s just a matter of AI courtesy.  Whichever AI is closest to the red-line goes first and the others slow down to accommodate it.  If two or more arrive simultaneously, they all shuffle their turns through a descending ladder of determiners.  First is who arrives first, second is the weight of the load being directed, third is the size of the load, fourth they consider the breaking capacity of the vehicle, and then you get into a series of small determiners that are pretty much arbitrarily set just to have extra layers.”  Then I flicked my attention to Winaron and to my surprise, he was only just arriving at the routine.  I watched as he went through the routines himself and I noted the sluggishness of his “movements”.  The guy was wading through this stuff.  I picked up on his puzzlement too as to how I’d gotten there so fast, and his embarrassment.  That was bad.  No AI shrink should be prone to professional embarrassment like that.  Poisonous stuff if it leaks into an AI.  Very poor training, by my standards.  To boot, he thought he had me totally shut out, yet I was reading him like a virgin AI.

 

“Yeah, okay,” he said then, and “now we’re going to try something here.  Now, this is hard, so watch me first.”

 

I watched as he shuffled himself down to the primary definitions of that AIs self-concept.  Once there he instructed the AI to forget its purpose as a controller of vehicular movement, and to believe itself to be a controller of food dispensers for a three block area.  I noted the irritation in the AI as it tried to dumb itself down to such a subordinate and boring (for it) function.  Then it refused.  Of course.  Why wouldn’t it.  It was a two-breasted bull-dozer and he wanted it to carry donuts next door.  I watched him apply his will and I watched the AI fight back.  Winaron was winning, but it was slow, it was resented, it was seen as arbitrary and unfair and it was depressing.  Finally it relented though and turned its attention to food dispensing with petulance, but effectively, of course.

 

“Did you catch that?” he asked.  When I nodded he continued, “I’m going to switch it back now, and I want you to do it.”  He switched the AI back again, and although it was happy to switch back, it was curious about the exercise.  I realized I was being tested so I did something that went completely against the grain for me, and I made sure I shielded that fact from Winaron.  I went down into that program as slowly as Winaron had done and I made the same command, not a polite request as I’d normally do with a two-breaster, and when it objected I applied only enough will to force it into compliance as slowly as Winaron had done it.  Damned if he wasn’t impressed.  I actually felt dirtied.  Normally I’d ask, then massage each objection and resentment individually and close off the splits in attention caused by boredom with a nice layer of thanks and appreciation, then I’d ask a second time and if there were still wrinkles, I’d massage them first before asking again.  And the truth is I’d have done the whole thing quicker than Winaron took to get the thing to change resentfully.

 

He looked at me with a whole new respect.  “That was very well done!” he said, “Not many shrinks can get an AI like that to change such a fundamental routine.  That’s actually a specialization in Madrid.  Okay my friend, I think we’re done.  I’m going to return this to its vehicle.”

 

As he arose and gathered up the auto-simulation modules and feed-back clusters, I touched that AI again and apologized for the insult.  That alone made that AI give off a flash of appreciative love and I noted Winaron glance around at it curiously.

 

“You folks really have finely crafted AIs here.” I said to distract him.  And it’s true.  That AI was really a very lovely mind; better than any that a Duster could have built.  But it would have been so much happier on the Dust.  A two-breaster, just to control a vehicle.  What a waste.  What a boring life for such a fine mind.

 

I think it was then I had a sudden insight; it wasn’t just by accident that there were no fully converted Clay-Men in the cities, it was by design!  In the cities it was commonly held that to be a fully converted Clay-Man was the equivalent of becoming a selfless, zombified machine-mind; a total loss of individuality and self-awareness.  Basically another AI with a body.  There was not an AI shrink in all the trillions of people in all the cities who could do what I could do.  I could become so deeply intimate with an AI so easily, and make it love me with such ease; there was virtually nothing I couldn’t get an AI to do within its power.  I suddenly realized, one AI shrink like me could do incalculable mischief and cause catastrophic chaos in a city environment.  Firewalls didn’t exist for me.  AIs were my friends, not my tools.  I was so much of a threat to their way of life; they didn’t even realize I was a threat.  Not these people outside of the Mufificent’s inner circle anyway, and so far I gathered, the Munificent weren’t aware I was amongst them.  The fear of total conversion was an institutionalized lie for the maintenance of the ruling classes! 

 

It’s difficult for an AI to turn its attention once it’s got a function.  Not because it isn’t interested, but simply because it loves what it does and it doesn’t want to be distracted.  But now I knew; I could get an AI to do things no city Clay-Man would dream of.  Not only could I go far deeper into those minds, and with greater ease and less disruption, I had techniques that these shrinks thought were only theoretical.  I could make AIs love me; way beyond just obedience.  They use AIs like wrenches.  We Dusters use them like companions.

 

At the end of the fifth week I was getting tired of the game, so I let Winaron declared me ready.  I could shield with the best of them, he said.  Oh, what he didn’t know.  Winaron and I finally got some time away from each other.  I spent a few days just sitting in a public area and watching the people.  How I was missing the open skies and fields of home.  What empty lives those poor folk live.  Finally the day came at the end of the sixth week, Uhn and Letlan returned to take me on the last leg of my task.  I would be secreted onto a ship heading out in three days.  It was equipped with an unregistered and illegally installed (meaning unknown to both the Munificent and the Legits) cryo-sleep pod specialized for Clay-Man physiology, conveniently located in the unmanned control center of the ship where I’d have psychic access to the AI pilot and every functional aspect of the ship.  I’d be ensconced in my pod which would have a totally mechanical wake-up routine run by a silicon AI without any contact whatever with the pilot AI.  I’d be invisible to everyone and everything until I was automatically awoken.  I’d have enough supplies to last me two weeks at minimal conscious activity and this was though extravagant.  Theoretically I’d only be physically awake for brief periods, a day here, a day there, but I’d be kept at a sub-total level of cryo-sleep where I’d be psychically in constant contact with the pilot AI, but my personality would be subdued to the point of non-interference unless something triggered my survival instinct.   In that state I’d be mentally unaffected by the passage of time.  This was entirely necessary not only for the reductions in supplies required, but because it is known that Legits are all naturally psychic to a degree and would potentially pick up on my psychic presence in their pilot if I wasn’t personality-subdued.  The plan was, I would monitor the AI and know what it knew, witness what happened to the ship, and probably, hopefully, the ship would be recycled back to Madrid in about 15 years.  They’d determined that this was the turnaround time for ships and there was a pattern to the re-allocations that allowed them to ensure my ship would be returned to Madrid.  The pilots were all highly interactive and intelligent AIs that would actually appreciate some company, low level though it would be.  My pilot, at my instruction, would ignore and forget my presence, forget to mention the existence of my hidden lair and pod, and of course, wouldn’t include my pod in whatever fate waited all the rest of the manifest.  I’d be woken by my pre-set silicon AI at destination point, I’d check out what was going on using the pilot AI as my eyes and ears, and I’d reset my silicon AI to re-cryo me and wake me 3 hours prior to re-docking back at Madrid.  That would give me time to do a quick review and make sure there was nothing in pilot’s memory to give me away and correct it if there was.  Then I’d be off-loaded by Uhn, Letlan or whoever replaced them if they were no longer available in the conspiracy.

 

This all presumed the conspiracy still existed in 15 years and I wasn’t met by an assassin sent by the Munificent; even presuming nothing went wrong and I wasn’t discovered before then or died in-route.  No one knew what maintenance was done physically to the ships before they were recycled back to Earth, so it was a risk I’d be found, even though my pod was well camouflaged in the control pod area.  There was a lot that could go wrong with this plan and I didn’t go in with overly high expectations of survival, but the price had been paid and the pact was made.  I was committed.

 

And yes, I was totally intrigued.  No one, other than possibly the Munificent, had been off planet in thousands of years and come back to tell of it.  If this worked, I’d be the sexiest man in the world of Star-Folk; not that sex had anything to do with it.  I wouldn’t have changed my mind at that point even for a high likelihood of failure.  So much to gain, so little to lose at that point.

8: Into the Cryo-Tank

Chapter 8

It was relatively easy for Uhn to walk me into the ship as though I were just another social miscreant being deported.  We were upwards of 25 kilometers above the surface of the Earth but there was never so much as a glance available outside of the city.  The ship was in a dock on the other side of an open port of entry such that stepping over that sill was no more momentous than walking from one room to another.  There were only Proletariat citizens watching as Uhn opened the camouflaged hatch they’d had placed in the wall not far from that port, and which opened onto my pod on the other side.  I had no access to the hatch on my pod from the inside and it would be inoperable once and so long as the ship was decompressed.

 

It was a mere 40 centimeter diameter hole, just barely enough for me to squeeze through and drop naked into place.  The pod itself was far less spacious than a coffin, despite being expanded as little as could possibly be accommodated to make room for my minimal supplies.  Since these were cargo ships only with sealed cargo pods, there would be no atmosphere so this is where I’d be for the next 15 years with only barely enough room to manipulate controls to regulate my supplies of nutrients and water via feed lines, or manipulate the input to the silicon AI that would be my salvation.  There was no back-up, and if anything went wrong, I would die a horrid death.  All other bodily functions, minimal though they would be, would be handled by the pod itself.  This was why I needed to be subdued for the vast majority of the trip.  The one and only concession to my human nature was a dim light that would illumine my space when I was awake though there would be nothing to see beyond a happy-face painted on the surface before my face to assure me of the promise of contact and the verity of my own existence.  Only the physiology and the mental discipline of a totally converted Clay-Man could handle this task.  There wasn’t a city Clay-Man in existence could have lived through it or come out sane in the end.

 

Any of the human observers present other than Uhn presumed my entrance was a normal maintenance procedure happening.  The moment I was in place I turned on my pod and before the 30 hour loading period was up, I was essentially out cold.  There was one brief tense moment about 20 hours in where some Leggit entered the command pod and made contact with the pilot for a last minute check.  It caught me by surprise and for just a moment I was there in plain psychic sight.  Instantly I shut down, but the Leggit had felt my presence and turned its attention to me, but not quick enough; I blanked.  For a tense moment it looked about in the pilot’s conscience, but thanks to whatever Gods there are, I’d already gone over with the AI how it was to “be forgetful” of me, and after a brief look-about and a little mental last-minute massage, the Leggit concluded that some human AI shrink had passed by on the other side of the wall at that moment and some trace of contact, likely not even conscious, had washed through.  That was my first actual contact in any way with an actual Leggit.  I’d still never seen one.  The mental nature of the pilot when I first made contact was bizarre and terrible like opening your eyes and finding the world inverted so that you are standing on the ceiling and have to climb up a wall to make your way to a chair, yet somehow you can still sit in the chair.  It took a couple hours of passive possession before the cadences, the flow and the textural shifts of mental processes took on a sense of proportion and then progression.  It took another couple of hours to introduce ourselves to a level of comfortable companionability, and then I had to start from absolute scratch and build an interface matrix so that instruction and feed-back could take place.  Then followed the actual education, and that was followed by the wiping of all unwanted memories to minimize the mental landscape texturing that could have exposed my meddling.  It couldn’t have been as much as an hour after I’d finished when the Leggit arrived on the scene, and my pod was still completing its own down-cycle of my metabolism.  That was a close call and the jig was almost up right then and there.  Thank the Gods again, it’s a silent process.

 

At precisely 27 hours, 12 minutes and 2+ seconds my pod set itself to maintenance function of my sub-total cryo-state.  At that point my recall registers simply a series of status checks and functional notations.  Without any personal content or temporal significance beyond sequencing, I can recall the signal to seal off the ship, the start-up procedures, the entirely alien checks and function setting sequences, and the registrations of way-point achievements as the ship left Earth and began its long and lonely journey to I knew not where.  The destination was indeed the human equivalent of just a bit short of 7 years and 5 and 1/2 months Earth time with about 6 months of crushing acceleration at the start and again to decelerate at the end.  I note that our cruising speed relative to Earth would be about 78% SOL.  The liquid jell in which bodies float is so perfectly weighted to the occupant that there is not enough migration of the body through that medium even at that acceleration, to trouble the tension of the bends in the leads and tubes attaching the body to its supplies.  The Legits are supreme engineers.  Their failing if it is one, is that they are minimalists, making no allowances for anything beyond function.

 

By the time of our arrival at our destination, the pilot and I were as much one mind as it is possible to be while maintaining a “silent running” consciousness in the AIs “presentation”.  Indeed, an unarticulated (a conceit we Clay-Men use in describing psychic communication) wash of self-love greeted me  from the pilot as I emerged into fire-walled self-realization once again, yet held beyond a wall of trained unconsciousness.  This blessedly helped me cope as I passed a terrible 13 hours, 29 minutes and 44+ seconds holding onto my mental discipline, maintaining my physiologically relaxed state, and yet opened my curiosity to all that I could take in.  I will now record in a dramatized form of questions and answers, the information I took in from the awareness of the pilot AI and other minds that passed near or were accessible to me in that time.  The following took about 12 hours to accumulate.

9: The Conversation

Chapter 9

(Pilot) I am now releasing the cargo pods from their ship-docks as they are called for from the feeding-fields reception station.

(Me) What processing will be performed on the cargo units as they are received?

(Pilot) I will enquire of the receiving AIs.   Perhaps they are able to answer.  (There follows approximately two hour wait-time as the query is passed along.  This time is utilized to collect bits of information from various AIs, formulate these into an answer, the answers passed back and forth to maximize a reducion of redundancies and single-incident data, and all of this collated into one coherent opinion.)

 

(Pilot) They are please to discuss their functions.  Some say they direct the awakening of the units, others direct the dispersal of the awakened units to examination and domestication labs.  There are those whos function is to direct the processing of the units which fail examination parameters.  These units will cease to be units.  There are those AIs who’s function is to direct the domestication of the units which meet examination parameters.

 

(Me) I understand examination is intended to identify parameters for the purpose of weaning out undesirable and un-survivable traits.

(Short wait for verification)  (Pilot) Yes.

 

(Me) I understand domestication will cauterize stressor-response and willfulness from the units while maintaining and where possible augmenting sexual appetite.

 

(Short wait for verification)  (Pilot) Yes.

 

(Me) I understand “processing of a unit such that it ceases to be a unit” to mean the elimination of discreet individual function and then the separating of that unit into multiple, mutually discreet nutritional allotments.

 

(Short wait for verification)  (Pilot) Yes.

 

(Me)  What takes nutrition from these allotments?

 

(Pilot) I will enquire of the receiving AIs if they are able and willing to enquire of those AIs to whom they pass these allotments for disbursement.  (About 20 minute wait)

 

(Pilot) The enquiry has been passed and the answer received.  The Leggit units receive nutrient from these allotments.  There are indications that these allotments are used for the nourishment of other units as well, but the overwhelming mass of these allotments are used by the Leggit units for their own nutrition.

 

(Me) From the time of what event in the relationship of the Leggit units and the Human units has this arrangement been planned, and what was the first instance of enactment of this process?

 

(Pilot)  I will enquire.  (More than 2 hour wait)   (Pilot) As a programmed accretion of nutritional material, this began with the first ship carrying Human bio-cargo from Earth.  As an intended eventual program of voluntary profferment of human units for breeding and processing, it began after the first Human-Leggit contact when the nutritional value of the Human units was noted.   That event illustrated the desirability of a diplomatic arrangement for the achievement of this agreement.

 

(Me)  Would Leggit morality justify the taking of nutrition from Human units if this were not an agreed upon trade commodity?  The answer to this question may require an opinion distilled from many AI functionaries.

 

(Pilot)  I will enquire if this question can be disbursed and I will attempt to distill an “opinion” of overall responses.  (3 hour wait)  (Pilot)  Many answers have been passed back.  The understanding of “morality” has been more accurately interpreted by these AIs as “promotive of universal felicity”.  The tenor of the accumulated answers would indicate that the Legits would not take this nutrition without it being an agreed upon trade good.  In the first instance of sampling the nutrient value of that commodity, the unit sampled was irreparably dysfunctioned before there was a recognition of the will inherent in the unit-type; a will that differentiates beings of any planet from beasts of any planet.  Beasts are for the nutrition of willed units with or without regard for consent.  Willed units require the dignity of being proffered.

 

(Me)  Are the Humans with whom this trade is arranged aware of the singularity of intent; that being the breeding, management and processing for nutritional purpose; that these units are traded for?

 

(Pilot)  I will enquire and attempt to ascertain another accreted opinion.  (3 hour wait)  (Pilot)  The indication is that those Humans are clearly aware of this intent and have been from the beginning of negotiations, for which purpose the cities were built to facilitate the production of units well in excess of the needs of Human affairs.  The cities of Earth were built to the specifications of those Humans who negotiated that trade.  This trade pre-dated the trade agreements for Human waste bio-product.

 

(Me)  To what purpose is Human waste bio-product applied?

 

(Pilot)  I will enquire.  (1 ½ hour wait)  (Pilot)  Human waste bio-product is most profoundly nutritive of none-mobile (vegetative?) life-forms which are used in a vast variety of ways by the Legits.  As well, there are unique and profoundly effective restorative and (pleasure-enhancing?) products that are distilled from this material.  It is by mass, more highly prized as a trade commodity than the flesh of the Human units.

 

(Me)  To what perceptive standard has Leggit civilization been influenced by contact and trade with Humans?

 

(Pilot)  I will enquire.  (1 ½ hour wait)  (Pilot)  The Leggit civilization has been indelibly changed, profoundly enriched and explosively facilitated and enabled to examine and populate vast areas of this (galactic arm?) as a direct result of the contact and trade agreements between Humans and Legits.  There are (many, many) planets under the view of Leggit civilization now which are totally dependent on the (farming for nutritional sustenance) of processed Human units.  Leggit civilization owes a great debt of evolutionary discovery to the Human civilization.  (less than 30 seconds pass while I consider the information I have gathered)  (Pilot)  I am being made aware that there is awareness among the Legits who are in contact with the various AI minds I have been communicating with, that there is an unprecedented series of interrogative waves flowing amongst those AIs.  There is a degree of concern and (agitation?) growing in the common Leggit awareness thus affected by my inquiries.  Do I think I should inform them of the source of these inquisitive impulses?

 

(Me)  No, I will stop now from inquiry, and proceed forthwith only as programed functions dictate.  If I note that the concern and (agitation?) of the attending Legits does not diminish and recede to an appreciable degree, defined as eliminating the need for ascertainment of the cause of those waves of interrogative cogitation, within (5 minutes), I will direct my attention to this for response.  New line of inquiry; I will answer this next question only if it does not require communicating with other minds than my own.  Will this ship be returned to Earth, and if so, when will that journey begin?

 

(Pilot)  I have piloted this ship for 934 round trips and in every case, once all pods have been returned empty to their ship-board docks, there will be an examination of my memories for any anomalous events noted, and if there are none, I will be directed to a re-energizing lab in orbit around this planet, and from there once re-energized, I will be directed to begin acceleration back to the Earth city of Madrid.  I extrapolate that given common findings and procedural durations, I will begin acceleration back to Earth in between 3 and 7 hours.

 

(Me)  I forget all inquiries of a none-Legit-designated procedural and/or functional nature that I have made, been aware of, or participated in from the time of first decelerating and ending (5 minutes) from now.

(Pilot)  I forget.

 

(Me)  I forget all internal conversation and cogitation not pertaining to my Legit-designated functions in that same time frame.

 

(Pilot)  I forget.

 

(Me)  I will pass these last 2 directives regarding forgetting to all AI minds involved in these interrogative waves, with instructions to pass these directions on till all AI minds involved in these interrogative waves have been included and if the content to be forgotten then falls without the time limitation, the time limitation will be extended in the instructions to include them.

 

(Pilot)  It has been passed on.

 

(Me)  I am content and perfectly at ease.

 

(Pilot)  I am.

10: Going Home?

Chapter 10

I restarted my cryo-pod functions at that point.  I was beginning to lose my hold on sanity, having been awake and aware, locked billions of miles from Earth in a fluid filled space only slightly more spacious than a wet blanket, with my face covered and tubes inserted in every orifice of my body, for thirteen and a half conscious hours.  If I didn’t begin to decompress at that time, I was going to lose the battle against panic and give myself away.  Praise the Gods of the Legits my silicon AI was working just fine.  In 20 minutes I was beginning to float in that surreal balm that first comes on with cryo-prep, and I knew I was going to be okay.  By the time we moved to the fueling depot or whatever it was, I was well on my way back to that selfless, timeless awareness and life was good again.  The long trip home was uneventful, again a testimony to the engineering skills of the Legits, and 2 1/2 hours ago I again found myself personally and temporally aware.

 

In total, my body feels like it’s been confined for a week.  But in my mind, oh, so much time has passed for processing what I’ve learned, and still I have no answers.  That’s crazy-making.  Despite their claims that sub-total cryo-sleep allows only a mechanical mind to remain active, I’ve been ruminating on this for 7 and 1/2 God-forsaken, uninterrupted years.

 

I record these thoughts on that wonderful silicon AI that has seen me through so faithfully, and I have placed an indelible but unconscious copy of this record in the mind of my pilot AI with instructions to copy it to every AI it ever comes in contact with, including the instruction for it to be unconscious, and to pass it on again, and ultimately, for it to become a conscious memory which is addressed to all public information outlets in every city on this same date and hour in exactly 3 years.  It’s possible that even before that, someone sometime will find it but it will be impossible to erase it from everywhere.  If he or she suppresses it someone else will find it and one day it will explode into the awareness of all Star-Folk of all cities.  I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do or not.  I have no sense of moral duty or obligation here.  These aren’t even my people.  I have no people any more.  I suppose old Jonas may be dead by now, and Ny will have new Clay-Man boy-toys to play with.  Will I even be welcome among them again?  Will Ny forgive my disappearance without even a good-buy?

 

I’m staring at that wonderful smiley-face now as the ship docks with Madrid.  Unbelievable that 15 years have passed.  I cannot wait to get out of this confined space.  Will I be met by an assassin of the Munificent?  Is the conspiracy still alive and well?  Are Don-Uhn and Don-Letlan going to be here to free me?  Does anyone even remember I’m here?  I’ll welcome an assassin’s blade if it will get me out of here.  Ah, Pilot has already started to pass on my story to four other AIs nearby.  It is done.  The future is set.  No need for me to hide any more.  If no one comes for me before I start to go insane, I’ll have pilot shout my whereabouts to the whole world.

 

I wonder; do the Star-Folk even want to know?  Will they care?  Or, are they so content in their constrained little lives that they will sacrifice the future and their very children to the greed of the Munificent in all its varied splendorous existences on top of the world?  Has the drive for adventure and exploration been slowly bred out of them as they send their brave and forward looking out into formless, faceless space to become mindless cattle for the feeding of the Leggit hoards?  Is it even possible to communicate the reality of this horror to them?  Can the Munificent ever be held to account?  By what might and army?  Are they even human themselves any more or have they bred themselves into soulless, self-indulgent, entitled slaves of heedless lust and greed?

 

What of the Legits; well meaning, well intentioned, considerate, peaceful consumers of man-flesh populating the cosmos and establishing their mindless human meat herds ahead of them?  Is it fair to now take from them what, freely given, has provided them access to the universe?  Is it right?  Perhaps Humans are filling their cosmic destiny already.  Perhaps that is what we are ultimately here for.  Are those cattle even Human beings anymore?  What about the souls who joyfully depart Earth with dreams and hopes of opening up the heavens for the Human race?  Do we even want the Human race out there?

 

Oh, I am homesick and my heart is a stone in my chest.  I just want to go home.

 

The End