will become part of digital immortality.
Cells. Revelation of the Immortal
The showers are over, and now it’s an impossible heat – a steam room, and that’s all. But this is outside, and now imagine what’s going on on the bus in the morning. Some of you may be wondering: why doesn’t the driver turn on the air conditioning? Neon signs and commercials depict beautiful metropolitan life, which will not come to our region soon. Maybe when 3D traffic of gravity cars is launched in the capital, they will give us their old air-conditioned buses?
You stand on the last step, but seven more people are pushing you from behind. In the indistinct mooing one can barely guess:
– Come on in, the middle is empty!
Hundreds of emotionless faces, buried in small boxes, from which short videos flow in a continuous stream, who know better how to live and what to do. They say that a couple of centuries ago people blinked like animals. They’re probably lying: in a moment, while you’re blinking, you can accidentally skip a couple of videos, and then nothing is clear.
«Look, I shared! Here they say that the Americans have again used meteorological weapons,» a guy of about twenty years old types with a long, mobile thumb. They say that a couple of centuries ago, thumbs were a finger that was thicker than others, but not longer; now the thumb is the thinnest, but also the longest of all.
«Yes, it’s all their fault! It’s Jon Petrowitz and Paul Bashirson again! We started our car, all the fruits first rotted under the downpours, which is why bananas are now cheaper than potatoes, and now we turned up the heat.»
«Or maybe it was the locals who decided to raise prices and profit from the weather on the sly? And the Africans are great, the prices for their bananas depend little on the dollar exchange rate, unlike the prices for potatoes and carrots.»
«No, ours have nothing to do with it. I watch videos all the time.»
«They’re lying! Where is the proof?»
«I don’t watch official videos. They say this in an underground channel, they won’t lie right away?»
«Both official and underground channels lead from the same office!»
I wonder what these two are chatting about so animatedly? Old films showed that people used to talk more often. Moreover, their speech was rich, their voices were sonorous and expressive. And now only specially trained people can speak normally; in the mooing of others it is hardly possible to recognize understandable words. Although, this is a logical course of evolution: why do we need a voice when we can correspond with friends and neighbors? Is it possible to transmit several megabytes of text information by voice in a second? Scientists suggest that our children will already be able to perceive a hundred megabytes per second.
The bald man, about forty years old, smiled. The only emotion I could discern among this crowd today. He also blinked frequently – once every two or three seconds, while everyone else could not look away from the monitor for even a second. I smiled back.
No correspondence – the rule is unshakable: all chats are carefully monitored. Only live speech in places where there is definitely no wiretapping. Although, recently, fewer and fewer people prefer oral speech, so the era of total wiretapping is also coming to an end.
We met Andrey a couple of years ago. For some reason, the people around me always seemed somehow insipid and emotionless. They are interested in a piece of fresh bread and a fresh spectacle – bright news or a new crazy short video on the Internet. But Andrey could recite Shakespeare’s poems by heart without an electronic translator! Tell me, who else is studying foreign languages now? There are electronic systems for transfers, but after the Great Division of Nations no one will be able to get abroad anyway.
Of course, I have always been different from other people; what is served instead of breakfast in the morning news report was not enough for me. I had difficulty finding forbidden old books. But after Andrei’s injection, it became even more sad:
– What happened to humanity? Where did our dream go?
Andrey looked into my eyes with a sad smile:
«But there are only a few people left – no more than a couple of thousand on the entire planet.»
– So now there are more than ten billion people!
– Are they still people? There are currently three intelligent species on the planet. You are familiar with people – you yourself are a representative of this species, and others would envy you. The second species absorbed the others. I call them in the old fashioned way – countries, because each of the forty currently existing states is a whole species, and the people in it are just cells. At birth, cells have the same set of chromosomes, only from birth they are placed in front of their eyes with a tablet that forms clip thinking. Cells are no longer people. They have not developed critical and analytical thinking. Cells perform monotonous work throughout their lives, taking care of the survival of the whole organism – the state.
– But each of us chooses the path to follow.
«Each of them,» Andrey made a significant pause, saying, «we are not them,» «chooses the same profession to which their parents dedicated their lives. There are transport workers, there are workers, there are even heads of state – but even they are just cells.
– As I understand it, you don’t consider yourself to be in cages?
«Unfortunately, I have no relation to people now either.» I am a representative of the third intelligent species – demons. From the word «immortals»
It seems that after these words I said something obscene and began to back away towards the exit. Meanwhile, Andrei silently took a knife in his hand (an ordinary knife – not an electronic slicer, not a computer bread slicer – an ordinary knife, imagine!) and ran the tip along his wrist. Blood gushed out, but at some point it was again «retracted» into the body, and the wound healed before our eyes.
– You can touch it. There is no scar left.
***
– My name is Andrei Ivanovich Bessmertny. It’s really ironic, isn’t it? A person with a different surname is unlikely to engage in such research. During the first American-Russian war, I was mobilized and served as a military paramedic. The guys called me Bes. I was captured. But soon someone from high management caught the eye of my developments. They ransomed me from captivity and made me the head of the research center «Regenerative Medicine». Even my name was classified; according to all documents, I went by the code name Koschey.
– Koschey the Immortal – what a fantasy your boss has.
– Fantasy – don’t spoil it. As soon as the research bore fruit, the big shots wanted to get an injection containing nanorobots. Killing a demon is almost impossible. Even the head grows back to replace the severed one. But there is also a downside to immortality; nothing comes for free. We can’t have children. The moment the «medicine» is taken, the body freezes in an instant and no longer develops. No new thoughts or ideas, no impressions. One moment in life that will last forever.
– It’s not for nothing that you are called demons: this is hell on Earth, not life.
– You
