Alien People

“The computer is accessible here, too?” one of the others asked.

“Yes. It’s basically available in every building, and even right outside the building so it can unlock the building by recognizing you, though locking and unlocking is really all you are allowed to do outside.”

“Computer, tell me the history about how the sex simulators went from an expensive luxury to free.”

There was no response.

“Computer, tell us the history about how the sex simulators went from an expensive luxury to free,” Chen echoed.

It started into the history, but Chen asked it to stop.

“Computer, how many people are in this building?”

“One.”

“Computer, how many life forms are in this building?”

“Five.”

“Computer, can I register the other life forms here as people?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to be registered people on this world?” Chen asked us.

“Yes,” we responded in unison.

“OK, you figure out who goes first, and I’ll start you off. The computer will ask you some questions, and you don’t have to say ‘computer’ when you answer them. You do have to say that any other time for the computer to recognize you are making a request.”

We agreed to go in rank order. The two women on the landing team were of equal rank after me, and they played rock-paper-scissors to choose who went first, which led me to explain that game to Chen. When they were done, Chen started.

“Computer, register this life form as a person. He does not speak our language; accept commands from his speaking device as if they were given by him.”

The computer now spoke, “Applicant, which language would you prefer?”

This was repeated, apparently in all the languages we had discovered and the translator got it mostly right for all of them.

I responded, “English.”

“Language not recognized. Please choose from the available languages.

A list of languages appeared on the wall in front of us, which our translator showed as the names we had assigned the languages we discovered. Just those eight.

Chen explained, “This lets you choose which language the computer will respond to you in. But it doesn’t know your language. Your translator seems to work well for my speech, so just take the first one. Say one.”

“One.”

“Language 1 accepted. Please speak your name,” the computer said in the first language it had spoken at the start.

“Joseph Michael Walters”

“What is your nickname?”

“Joe”

“Gender?”

“Male”

“Birthplace?”

“Earth”

“Location not recognized. Please restate birthplace.”

“Off-world”

“Location not recognized.”

“Chen, what is the name of this city?”

What she said was translated as Bridgeport, and she had the computer take that as my birthplace.

“Birthplace Bridgeport accepted. Date of birth?”

“Hmm, it’s not measured in your calendar. And I was in suspended animation for 150 years that isn’t reflected in my apparent age, but I guess that happens to your people in the simulators, too. So I guess I should be 182 years old. Maybe 178, due to the slightly longer years here. What year did you say it was here?”

Chen shrugged. “Computer, what year is it?”

“3479”

So I did some quick mental math and responded, “OK. Computer, set my date of birth to year 3301, month 3, day 12.”

“Do you have any living relatives?”

I thought for a moment, recalling that any that I knew would be dead. There certainly weren’t any on this planet, and that meant that the computer wouldn’t know them as people. So I said, “No.”

“Registration complete.”

Chen continued the process to register the rest of our current team.

Now I repeated my request from earlier.

“Computer, tell us how the simulators went from an expensive luxury to free.”

The story went on for about half an hour, but the gist was that it was expensive because of the amount of electricity needed to power the sims. Imagine buying a ticket for a long-haul airplane flight to participate in sex sims for the hour that the transit took here. They had long ago exhausted the fossil fuels here and relied on solar and wind power, apparently never having developed nuclear power, or at least not having fusion and deciding the radioactive waste of fission power couldn’t be tolerated. So there was a big effort to build solar cells, and expand the offshore wind farms. For a generation, most new jobs were based on making the solar cells, whether mining to obtain materials, refining, manufacturing, or installing.

They had a global, high-capacity, superconducting electric grid and they did have some batteries to cover peaks in demand and slowdowns in generation, but solar from the side facing the sun at any given moment, together with wind power worldwide, powered the whole world, so they did not need the huge daily cycling batteries associated with the use of solar power on Earth. As more solar power systems were installed, electricity became cheaper and normal people could start to afford trips into the simulators, while rich people could start to live there all the time. This led to the development of eating and bathroom programs within the simulators.

Some solar and wind installation jobs were dangerous and put people at heights, and they paid people well to take the risks. The jobs to maintain those installations were equally dangerous, so they developed autonomous robots to do the maintenance jobs. Jobs building and repairing robots replaced the other manufacturing jobs, but many fewer people were needed, so people started working fewer hours. Eventually they built robots that could repair the other robots, and robots that could recycle damaged equipment and build new ones from them, and the entire system ran autonomously. Once the solar and wind networks were finished, the cost of electricity fell to nothing, as there was excess power available, and they made the simulators free.

In fact, they did away with money. When I asked for more about this, I found that the rooftop garden thing had been going on for generations. The population had long exceeded the capacity of farmland to grow enough food for people, and people had rooftop gardens to grow most of the food they needed. Once the labor of people was no longer needed due to robots being built for all sorts of manual labor, many people couldn’t earn money, and since they didn’t have to pay for electricity, didn’t have to pay for food, and most everything else was handled by a system of self-maintaining robots, the government simply did away with money. Some people still worked jobs, including caring for and educating children, and there were a small number of government jobs, mainly law enforcement and some oversight over the automated systems that ran everything.

So people played games, enjoyed entertainment (which was mostly old material, but there were hundreds of years of movies, music, books, etc. all available on demand on their version of the Internet; more than anybody could ever watch), and they used the simulators. Over time, though, people got bored of the other stuff, and everybody used the simulators. The children grew up, no more children were born, child care and teachers were no longer needed, and the people doing these jobs also ended up using the simulators. And the government officials, bored with days, weeks, and months with literally nothing that needed doing, also resigned, bypassing a rule that prohibited government overseers from going into the simulators. They were allowed to travel, but not to purposefully spend time in the simulators. The rule was supposed to ensure there was always some human oversight, but nobody envisioned the entire government resigning. By the time they did, there was nobody left to object except other government officials facing the same situation, who followed suit rather than protest.

I started writing my report to send back to Earth with these details. It was going to need a lot more, but this was useful.

One of our reminders went off, and we agreed to call in the rest of our crew. The group in space had completed a plan we had agreed upon, to move one of the ships to the other garden station and steer it to a position opposite the first one around the planet, ensuring that they had maximum visibility of the planet and access to send signals back to Earth at all hours. The reminder was that their orbital position after this maneuver was nearing a point from which they could land most quickly near us. Of course, they had been watching us and knew it was going well for us here, and they were ready to come down as soon as we gave the word, which we did. We also called in our two pilots from the first lander to join us.

When I explained to Chen that two more people already on the planet and 9 more coming from orbit would be joining us, she appointed the four of us as other government officials who would have the power she did to register people and reassign homes. The pilots arrived pretty quickly and we registered them.

We tried some of the food from Chen’s garden and it was fine. Better than space rations, and comparable to what we had been eating on the space station. We also learned there was a rainwater collection system on every house which filtered the water to provide drinking water. Water that was leftover after cooking was put into a system that filtered it again, using it to water the gardens when rain didn’t supply enough. Water that ran off the plants was allowed to soak down into the ground naturally.

In her kitchen, there was a small refrigerator. The Martians didn’t eat meat, and they made a calcium-rich drink from certain plants rather than drinking animal milk, except for infants breast-feeding, so they really only needed to preserve half-eaten fruits and certain harvested plants. There were a few black lumps of who-knows-what left in there that she cleaned out, though we didn’t see what she did with them.

Next, the six of us looked for homes with suitable clothing. We agreed the clothes we came in would only last so long and we needed to find local clothes if we didn’t want to eventually be going around naked.

Their clothes included shirts, pants in various lengths, and dresses. But we discovered quickly that their pants, all tight-fitting styles, had a roughly palm-sized hole in the rear for the tail. For us, it would mean a big stretch of our butt crack showing, unless it was covered with a dress. The dresses had a vent in the back for the tail, basically two pieces of fabric that overlapped, with a hole between them that they threaded the tail through vertically. This meant the hole closed flat like the space between two shirt buttons when we wore them with no tail. There were dresses for both men and women, easily distinguished by whether they had space for the breasts. Two of the men had tried putting on two pairs of pants, one backward, but they found that uncomfortable, and pretty soon everyone was in a dress and we gathered again in Chen’s house.

Chen explained, “Each of your homes has a bathroom, and you can dispose of any trash in there.”

She demonstrated, opening the door to hers and depositing some inedible bit from food we ate into a covered chute she pointed out to us, just inside the door.

Canelli spoke up, “I could use a bathroom now.”

Chen stepped out, gestured to indicate it was open for her, and Canelli pulled the door shut behind her. But a moment later she came back out.

“How do you actually use the bathroom here?”

She opened the door wide so that we could see inside, and the others of us moved around the room to look. There was a mirror, a countertop with a few items on it, and not much else we could see.

“The mirror is for grooming. When you are ready to go into the bathroom sim, touch the panel on the far wall.”

“Oh, it’s a sim?”

“Yes. All our bathrooms are sims. You can only access the bathroom sims here, not any other sims.”

I and all my crewmates let out sighs of relief. We were not going to have the temptation of sex sims in every home.

“It’s based on bathrooms we had a long time ago, before I was born. The first thing you will see is a choice of body. There are three choices, and you can think or say 1, 2, or 3 or press buttons in front of you. 1 is your own body, 2 is a generic male body, and 3 is a generic female body. Then you will be in the bathroom, naked, and there will be an oval toilet that you sit on and pee and poop. There is a bidet built into the toilet, and once you are sitting you will see two buttons. The first is to spray water to clean yourself, and the second is to spray air to dry the water. But you don’t have to use the bidet. The bathroom sim ensures you are clean when you leave. It will clean your clothes, too.”

Canelli went in and did her business, and the rest of us took a turn as well even if we didn’t really need it. When we were done, we compared stories. We had chosen all the body types among us. Naturally, the generics were generic New Martians (who we quickly decided to simply call Martians). We now knew Martians peed and pooped like humans, except the males did not use their penis, with the urethra instead opening at the outermost point of the scrotum.

When we asked about them, Chen explained, “The generics were originally put in to help disabled people. If it was difficult for you to use the bathroom because of your condition, you could choose a generic body which would have no difficulty.”

“Originally?” I asked.

“While the bathroom and eating programs change the contents of your body, they also figured out how to make sims that would modify the body itself, materializing you afterward with changes in your body that you specified, rather than just changing the contents and removing dirt on it and such. Most of the sims, including all the sex sims, explicitly don’t change your real body in any way, regardless of what you choose or do inside, but there are other sims that can fix just about anything that’s wrong with your body.”

“So you stopped having disabled people because they all got fixed in sims.”

“Exactly.”

Chen didn’t say more, but seemed to be hesitating and thinking about saying something.

“I’m going to guess it didn’t stop there.”

“Good guess. People made custom versions of the fix-your-body sim which ‘fixed’ things that most people wouldn’t consider wrong in the first place. There were people with extra arms, giant and tiny sizes, and some outright monsters, but they put a stop to that. Now you can only overwrite parts of your body with corresponding parts from the generic male and female bodies, which will be adjusted to match your size and skin tone, and if your size is far from the average you can bring it closer to average, and you can change skin tone, hair, and a few other bits of your appearance within the normal ranges.”

“So they are back to just fix-your-body sims.”

“Well, mostly. It’s possible to pull from either generic body, so you can draw from the other to give yourself a sex change.”

“Did a lot of people do that?”

“At first, yes. It was quite popular before the monsters, and nobody saw anything wrong with it so it was explicitly left as an available option. Later, when everybody was using the sims all the time, there was less of that, because you can take a different body within any given sex sim, though people still change sex to use the statues, like I did.”

“You changed? You were originally male?”

“Yes. But I preferred being female in the sex sims. I think women have it better. So I changed to female so I could jump on the erections of the statues to get into sims where I’m female with a male partner.”

“Does that immediately throw you into sex with what the statue represents?”

“Yes. The alternative is to touch a panel on any of the statues, similar to the one for entering the bathroom sims. When you do that, you first get a menu like in the bathroom sims, but with many more options. But sometimes I didn’t much care, and just wanted some sex, fast. I had to get all new clothes, but by the time I did that it was easy to get robot-made clothes.”

I noted for both my report and for our later usage that robots made their clothes, as Chen continued.

“There is essentially an unlimited amount of customization possible if you go through the menus before you enter the sex part. You can choose just about any body for yourself, including forms banned from the real world. You can add more or fewer limbs, otherwise impossible shapes or dimensions, and you can have either or both sexes. There are alien bodies with different skin colors; everybody on this world has green skin, though it varies just as yours do: from very pale green to very deep green and also varieties that have reddish sections. That is why I recognized you as aliens, because we have legends of visitors from other worlds with other colors of skin besides green and red.”

I interrupted, “That’s remarkable, because nobody on my world has naturally green skin, and one of the earliest and most persistent stories of aliens was about ‘little green men’ with green skin who supposedly came from a red planet near ours called Mars. There were never any real little green men, though; they were fictions that people made up and repeated. Your planet looks red to us from our home world because the solar cells absorb light and most of the reflected light is from the water, which is full of red plant life, so we called it New Mars even though we didn’t know it was actually populated by green people. But go on.”

“You can likewise choose any kind of body for your sexual partner(s). You can give them any kind of personality you want as well, from pliable and submissive, willing to accept any suggestion of what you want them to do, to one who will totally take control and tell you what to do, and from ones who need a lot of coaxing to get them to have sex to total nymphomaniacs who want nothing but sex. Oh, and I should mention that panels on the walls and pillars of the sex sim rooms let you enter non-sex sims, again with a menu to let you choose what you want.”

She stopped to make a query when she mentioned this.

“Computer, how many people are in simulations right now other than the sex sims, standard eating and drinking sims, sleep sims, and bathroom sims?”

“One million, one hundred forty one thousand, six hundred eight.”

I remarked, “They are obviously not very popular. 1.1 million out of 12 billion people in sims are doing something other than sex or handling their body’s necessities, about one hundredth of one percent. But they are used.”

At further prompting from Chen, the computer provided a run-down of the million. About a third were in some kind of sports sim. Almost as many were in hobby sims, like painting. About 20% were acting out interactive versions of this world’s popular fiction. Just over 10% were in tourism sims, viewing the famous places of this world, but rather than going there physically, they could take in everything virtually and switch locations instantly. 5% of the people were in the body experiment sim. Chen explained this let you experiment virtually with different body types, and you could save them as custom avatars for use in other sims. Just 5 people were exploring the real, permanent body modification sim. 271 were in other miscellaneous sims that didn’t fall into any of these categories.