Mere moments after humanity’s return to Earth, the enigmatic Celestials appeared at a distance thousands of kilometers from Earth. They took no overt action. They were simply there, impassive, unmoving, and intimidating.
Chuck knows that you love him, Sarah, okay? It’s just, you’re kind of a big fish, you know? And to a regular guy with no supercomputer in his brain, I gotta think that’s pretty intimidating.
My organic brain was removed and discarded, and control of my body handed over to my “jewel” - the Ndoli Device, a neural-net computer implanted shortly after birth, which had since learnt to imitate my brain, down to the level of individual neurons. I had no qualms, not because I was at all convinced that the jewel and the brain experienced consciousness identically, but because, from an early age, I’d identified myself solely with the jewel.
P.S. The whole story is here at the author’s site Closer — Greg Egan
This device will be implanted into your brain. It will form a link between your mind and the ship’s computer.
Many BrainPal users find it useful to give their BrainPal a name other than BrainPal. Would you like to name your BrainPal at this time?
“Yes,” I said.
Please speak the name you would like to give your BrainPal.
“Asshole,” I said.
You have selected “Asshole,” the BrainPal wrote, and to its credit it spelled the word correctly.
Be aware that many recruits have selected this name for their BrainPal. Would you like to chose a different name?
“No,” I said…
“No, mother is a special, one-name, and a father you have here. Not just friend, nor teacher, nor brother, nor sister. What is acquaintance? What a funny, hard word. Aunt. Maybe. Yes, perhaps that will do. And you think of such odd words about me. Thing and monster! Monster, what a horrid sort of word. I really do not think I am a monster. Beast. That will do.* Aunt Beast*.”
We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of the great monster, folded over upon us, above us, so that the sickening reek of its body filled the air, a stone’s thickness away from our cellar. The monster gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone. The thing that had called it across a million years was gone. And the monster was opening its mouth and sending out great sounds. the sounds of a Fog Horn, again and again. And ships far at sea, not finding the light, not seeing anything, but passing and hearing late that night must’ve thought: There it is, the lonely sound, the Lonesome Bay horn. All’s well. We’ve rounded the cape.
It"s easier to believe there’s a monster under the bed if you’ve spent the last six months arguing with a monster.
So Rabd blasted the ugly, obscene, horrible, flat-eyed thing down where it stood. And scooped up his bride with loving tentacles. And went back home to a hero’s reception.
“Just take a frickin’ flechette gun, if you really need to splatter people wholesale,” growled the StateSec sergeant, plucking a hand pulser out of the locker himself. “At least that way you won’t blow any essential hardware apart, too! Or have you forgotten how to aim at anything smaller than a moon?”
‘Do you know what that is?’
I nodded and said, ‘I think I may have seen it before.’
‘That,’ said Florida, ‘is the Moonyouidiot.”
Did you remind him that it took the U.N.S. fifty-two years,and over twenty thousand resonance generators to do the job? and that even then it was an accident? Io popped like a grape one day, right out of the blue, and her nickel-iron core shot straight into Jupiter."
“Ummm. . . No. I didn’t know that.”
“Next time you hear somebody say “I wouldn’t do that for all the nickels in Jupiter,” you’ll know they probably can’t be bought.”
His implant, he said, contained complete maps of the nickel mine that was supposedly located near here in his version of Earth; after all, this had been the site of the facility where he worked, too.
Sumone Yiden Smiff was a businessman of note. Was, past tense. Through years of sweat and swearing and amazingly smart (or lucky) deals he’d built up a mining empire that spanned the sum of known space. At 74 years, he had reached the apex of a career stretching half a century. His companies mined precious commodities like Impervium, Obstinatium and Bitanium. He wasn’t really famous, or ostentatious. In fact he only ever made the cover of Fortune One Billion once, twenty-five years ago.
I followed it into a displacement booth. Eyes followed me all the way. It was embarrassing, being accosted in a public drugstore by a two-headed monster. Maybe the puppeteer knew it. Maybe it was testing me to see how badly I needed money.
My need was great. Eight months had passed since Nakamura Lines folded. For some time before that I had been living very high on the hog, knowing that my back pay would cover my debts. I never saw that back pay. It was quite a crash, Nakamura Lines. Respectable middle-aged businessmen took to leaving their hotel windows without their lift belts. Me, I kept spending. If I’d started living frugally, my creditors would have done some checking… and I’d have ended in debtor’s prison.
“Do you know what the interest is on 11 million?”
“No…but i can tell you the interest on the 90 thousand that you still owe me!”
Teller: OK, you had a balance of 93 cents…
Fry: Alright!
Teller: And at an average of two-and-a-quarter percent interest over a period of 1000 years, that comes to … $4.3 billion.
Sergeant: “Correct, there is no obligation. Unless, of course, war were declared.”
[Alarm goes off]
Fry: "What's that?"
Sergeant: "War were declared."That could mean anything. An experimental war zone, anything.
We call it a gismo. That’s right, a gismo. A bit difficult to describe. Like a cross, I suppose, without the top part. Sort of two arms on a stand. What happens is this. You hang something on one arm. Anything at all. A watch, a bracelet, money, anything. I supposed you could hang a locomotive on, only it’s a bit heavy. But anyway you hang something on and there on the opposite arm appears an exact replica.