The Horse’s Mouth

So I got onto the landing craft (we chose to use the one from the ship I arrived on) and before we landed I settled down to start my sleep cycle along with another explorer, Melissa Canelli. The pilot from my shift, Lakshmi Ramanujan, was going to stay awake as a backup until we landed, since landing was, after all, the most difficult piloting job, and then sleep. Clara Callahan, the first pilot, would monitor our exploration team from the landing craft until relieved by Ramanujan after her sleep, and Anton Fredericks and Sarah Carmichael would be the exploration team who would first seek out the natives.

When Canelli and I woke up, Callahan, still watching our team’s video feed, gave us a recap.

“It’s going OK. Our two explorers entered the building we had been observing via drone earlier. It took about 20 minutes before any of the people appeared, and the first one ignored our people and went into another fantasy. The second, a woman, came out about 10 minutes later, and Carmichael called out, ‘Excuse me!’ which was translated by her wearable device into both of the languages seen on the sign here. But the woman ran and hid from our duo, and after a few minutes went into another simulation. So it went for several more people. Finally we got a woman to help us. This one reacted to our explorers’ attempt to get her attention with ‘Eek! Aliens! Computer, end simulation!’ and a computerized voice responded that she was not in a simulation. But she stopped to listen to us, and since then, our explorers have been explaining how we discovered their world and traveled over what would normally be lifetimes to get here, and the resident has explained a little of her culture, such as it is, or was.”

So Canelli and I joined them. We had landed in one of the spaces we identified as possibly parks, and had to walk just under a kilometer to reach the large building within which was the simulator room where our team was. We found them in another room adjacent to the sex simulator room, one that had tables and chairs and perhaps was once meant to be a restaurant. Their chairs were a little lower than what we were used to and had an obvious hole for their tails, which our guest was using, but they worked fine for us to sit on.

“Oh, now there are four of you, and you all have clothes. I am getting self-conscious sitting here naked,” were the first of her words I heard translated by the device I wore.

Almost as soon as I sat down, she walked back into the other room, asking, “Computer, remind me which locker was mine and open it for me.” The computer gave her a number, and she retrieved something from the locker. She appeared sad as she brought it back to our group and put it on the table.

“These were my clothes, but they are useless now.” The translator was pretty good, able to pick up and convey the emphasis she put on the word equivalent to “were” in her language. The clothes were fused together in a lump, and the parts she was able to separate from the rest had obvious holes.

“How long have you been here?” Fredericks asked.

“I’ve completely lost track of time. Computer, how long has it been since I stored my clothes in the locker?”

The computer responded, “34 years, 6 months, 12 days.”

I asked, “How old were you when you went in?”

“22.”

“Is your appearance normal for someone from your world 56 years old?”

“Oh, we don’t age in the simulators. I’m aging now, but the small time we spend outside the simulators doesn’t add up to much. I’m 56 now, but I’m effectively still 22.”

“Interesting. So your people have no need to work, you can play forever, and you stay eternally young.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it. When I turned 17 and was allowed in the sex simulators, at first I only went a little bit, and then a bit more, and once I was 20 sometimes for days at a time. After a while I decided life outside the simulators was boring, and there was nothing keeping me from staying here all the time, so I did.”

“Yes, we noticed that,” said Canelli. “It appears that everybody on your world has made that decision.”

“Everybody? No. Children aren’t allowed in, nor are the government officials.”

Canelli continued, “We have run detailed scans of your world. Unless your children have a significantly different form, we know exactly what your life signs look like, since they are not too different from our own. But the only life signs anywhere are fleeting ones around for a minute or two and then gone again, in facilities like this one.”

“What? Everybody is in the simulators? Computer, how many children are there in the world younger than 17?”

“Zero. The last known birth occurred 31 years, 11 months, and 8 days ago.”

“Computer, who is in charge of the government of the city?”

“Nobody. All government roles are vacant.”

“Computer, who and where is the nearest government official?”

“There are no registered government officials anywhere on the world.”

“Computer, how many living people are there on the world, including those currently in simulators?”

“Twelve billion, four hundred seventy nine million, twenty four thousand, six hundred eleven.”

“Computer, how many living people are there on the world who are not in a simulation or in a simulator room?”

“One.”

“Computer, am I the one you counted?”

“Yes.”

She pointed to the doorway between the simulator room and the room we sat in. “It counted me, because the simulator room ends there. And I guess it doesn’t recognize you as people.”

She slumped with her head resting on one hand. “OK, it’s hard to believe, but it looks like you are right. All my people decided to go into the simulators rather than face real life. Are the maintenance robots still active?”

She didn’t address this question to the computer, so when it did not answer, I did.

“Yes. We have seen many of them in action, keeping the solar and wind energy systems operating. There are some in other buildings, too, but they do not appear to be maintaining the individual houses. Some of those have collapsed.”

“It’s likely they were damaged by storms. The maintenance robots normally take care of all the buildings, but if a home is destroyed or seriously damaged during a storm, its resident has to request a repair, so that the robots prioritize repairs where they are wanted. Normally, government officials would request repair of damaged vacant homes once the occupied ones were taken care of. If all the people were in the simulators, they weren’t at their homes to request a repair, and if there are no government officials, they couldn’t do it either. Speaking of which, I am still bothered by being naked, so let me go back to my house and find some clothes. There should be some that have survived the time.”

Emperor of the World

She led us all to her home, which was a couple hundred meters from the building we had been in, but it was one of the destroyed buildings.

“Hmm,” the woman said. “I don’t imagine the others will care if I take their clothes, but their homes will be locked. But wait, there’s no government! I wonder...”

She led us back into the building we were in before.

“Computer, is the role of emperor vacant?”

“Yes.”

“Computer, I volunteer to be emperor.”

“Since there were no declared candidates in the last election for emperor, as of this moment, year 3479 month 8 day 12, you, Chen Dresta Balanjia, have become the emperor of the world, effective until the next election with candidates or until you resign or die.”

I chose not to worry about the fact that emperor was an elected position here. I treated it as a limitation of the translation; perhaps, in terms of power, the role was equal to an emperor.

“Well, I’m glad the system works. It’s always been possible for people to volunteer themselves into roles that were vacant after an election. Usually they aren’t accepted immediately; the nearest supervisor over that role has to approve of unelected volunteers. But I guess there is no supervisor for emperor. We learned how this system works in school. Once, when an entire town was destroyed by a storm and everybody in the government was killed, they had to reestablish the whole government that way, with the mayor being approved by the governor and then approving others under him. They also do that when establishing new cities. This is like that but restarting the entire government of the world. As emperor I should be able to enter any home whose occupants are away, and that’s all of them. My size is common, and one of the houses on this block should have clothes that fit. Then I can see about how else I can help you.”

Chen now led us to the group of houses nearest the sex parlor, and she went from house to house, unlocking each one and going inside briefly. It took her until the fifth house to find a dress that she came out wearing. But she stopped at the doorway.

“Come on in. My house was destroyed, and all my stuff is surely ruined, so I might as well make this one mine. There are clothes here that fit me. In fact... Computer, register this as my home.”

“Home registered.”

“You see, as emperor, I can exercise every government power including the one to assign housing, even for myself.”

Then we followed her inside, and there were couches and chairs not too different from what we had on Earth, except the back was held up by metal bars, leaving a gap between the padded parts of the back and the seat. We all sat down, including Chen, who put her tail into the gap as she sat down.

“Now, how can I help you?”

Everybody started speaking at once, but the others deferred to me as the ranking officer.

“Well, we’d like to know a lot about your history. Please start with how the sex simulators got started, as it could explain your current situation. Also, without going into too much graphic detail, what you experience in the simulators. We were afraid that if we went in we’d get just as addicted to them as your people seem to have done.”

“Well, the simulators have been around since well before I was born, but they got better over time. As I understand it, they started as a transportation system. You could travel instantly over long distances. Or very fast, anyway, but not completely instant. It takes some time to transmit your pattern. If you’re going to the next town, it’s pretty quick, but if you are going to the other side of the world, it takes an hour. And since it took a day to get to the other side of the world otherwise, that was the way it was mainly used at first.”

“Transportation via matter-to-energy-to-matter conversion?” I asked.

“Yes,” Chen replied, and then continued her story. “You actually experience that hour, though at first it was as a bland nothingness. Somebody figured out how to project entertainment programs into the virtual space your essence was in during this transmission, and at first it was just like the programs that people watched at home in those days.”

Fredericks interrupted, “Those programs are still running. Our advance craft found them broadcasting on a loop on many different frequencies, and these make up the bulk of how our translation systems learned your languages.”

Chen continued, “I’ll keep that in mind. Over time, the in-transportation entertainment got interactive, and they added sensory feedback, and then eventually people figured out how to make simulated sex using this feedback, and that was available as a premium option. But it was so popular they made sex simulators like the one you found me in, where you could experience virtual sex while not going anywhere. As I understand it, your pattern just goes around in loops under the building. There’s a transit hub in another part of the building you could use to go elsewhere; the larger sex sim rooms were built over them to take advantage of the already large computer systems in them.”

Carmichael asked, “Does it feel the same as real sex?”

“I’m told it feels just like real sex, but I’ve never actually had real sex. Hardly anybody did that by the time I started going into the simulators.”

“Do you need to eat?” Canelli asked.

“Yes, sort of. If I am going through simulators constantly, I might only be out of simulation for about 10 minutes a day, and that’s all the time that passes for my body. So I can go a month or so between eating, and then there are eating programs that actually feed your body pattern, and I just do one of those when I feel hungry. Likewise, you can call up a bathroom sim, do your business using your choice of body form, and your real body’s wastes will be eliminated. Apart from the eating and bathroom sims and a few other special ones designed to improve your real body, the sims are just sims, and anything you do in them does not affect your real body.”

“So they thought of everything. Made it so you never have to leave the simulators.”

“Yes. And as I understand it they were quite expensive when they started, but by the time I was old enough to be taught what the simulators were, they were free. I don’t know how that happened. Maybe you can ask the computer.”