When it got really good it began to raise some unexpected problems. Surprisingly, the problems were theological. The promises of Earthly religions were being fulfilled in a way the religious leaders had never planned, for indeed it seemed now to be true that 'life' was only a sort of overture, and that 'death' was in fact nothing more than the stepping stone to 'eternal bliss in Heaven.'
The dying man who then woke up to find himself no more than a collection of bits in the datafile of the immense computer networks might well wonder why he had clung to life in his organic body so long, for the machine afterlife had everything going for it. He had lost nothing through death. He still could 'feel.' The machine- stored ate as much as they liked-neither cost nor season were factors in planning a menu-and if they chose they excreted, too. (It did not matter that the 'food' the 'dead man' ate was only symbolically represented by bits of data, because so was he. He could not tell the difference.) All the biological functions were possible. He was deprived of none of the pleasures of the flesh. He could even make love with his dearest-provided only that she had stored herself in the same net-or with any number of dearests, real and imaginary, if that was how his tastes went. If he wanted the
society of the still-living friends he had left behind, there was nothing to stop him representing himself to them (as a machine-generated hologram) in order to have a conversation, or a friendly game of cards.
There was also travel; and, perhaps most popular of all, there was work.
After all, the basic human work is only a kind of date processing. Humans don't dig the foundations for skyscrapers. Machines do that; all the humans do is run the machines, and that could be done as readily from machine storage as in the flesh.
All those books that the deceased had been meaning to read-the plays, the operas, the ballets, the orchestral performances-now there was time to enjoy them. As much time as he chose. Whenever he chose.
That svas heaven indeed. The dead person's style of life was
exactly what he wanted it to be. He didn't have to worry about what he could 'afford' or what was 'bad for him.' The only limit was his own desire. If he wished to be cruising in the Aegean or sipping cold rum drinks on a tropical beach, he only had to order it. Then the datastores would summon up any surround he liked, as detailed as any reality could be and just as rewarding. It was almost like living in a perfect video game. The operative word is
'perfect,' for the simulations were just as good as the reality; in fact they were better: Tahiti without mosquitoes, French cuisine without gaining weight, the pleasure in the risks of mountainclimbing without the penalty of being killed in an accident. The deceased could ski, swim, feast, indulge in any pleasure . . . and he never had a hangover.
Some people are never happy. There were a few of the formerly dead who weren't satisfied. Sipping aperitifs at the Cafй de la Paix or rafting down the Colorado River, they would take note of the
taste of the Campari and the spray of the water and ask, 'But is it real?'
Well, what is 'real'? If a man whispers loving words to his sweetheart on the long-distance phone, what is it that she 'really' hears? It isn't his own dear voice. That was a mere shaking of the atmosphere. It has been analyzed and graphed and converted into a string of digits; what is reconstituted in the phone at her ear is an entirely different shaking of the air. It is a simulation.
For that matter, what did she hear even when her darling's lips were only inches away? It was not her ear that 'heard' the words. All the ear does is register changes in pressure by their action on the little stirrup and anvil bones. Just as all the eye does is respond to changes in light-sensitive chemicals. It is up to the nerves to report these things to the brain, but they only report coded symbols of the things, not the things themselves, for the nerves cannot carry the sound of a voice or the sight of Mont Blanc; all they transmit is impulses. They are no more real than the digitized voice of a person on a phone.
It is up to the mind that inhabits the brain to assemble the~e coded impulses into information, or pleasure, or beauty. And a mind that happens to be inhabiting machine storage can do that just as well.
So the pleasure, all the pleasures, were as 'real' as pleasure ever is. And if the mere pursuit of pleasure began to pall, after a (subjective) millennium or two, he could work. Some of the greatest music of the period was composed by 'ghosts,' and from them came some of the greatest advances in scientific theory.
It was really surprising that, nevertheless, so many people still preferred to cling to their organic lives.
All of this led to a rather surprising situation, though it took awhile for anyone to realize it.
When the Gateway explorers started bringing back useful Heechee technology, the world population on Earth wasn't much more than ten billion. That was only a tiny fraction of all the human beings who had ever lived, of course. The best guess anybody would make about the total census was-oh, well, maybe-let's say, somewhere around a hundred billion people.
That included everybody. It included you and your neighbor and your cousin's barber. It included the president of the United States and the pope and the woman who drove your school bus when you were nine; it included all the casualties in the Civil War, the American Revolution, and the Peloponnesian Wars, and their survivors, too; all the Romanovs and Hohenzollerns and Ptolemys, and all the Jukes and Kallikaks, as well; Jesus Christ, Caesar Augustus, and the innkeepers in Bethlehem; the first tribes to cross the land bridge from Siberia to the New World, and also the tribes who stayed behind; 'Q' (an arbitrary name assigned to the unknown first man to make use of fire), 'X' (the arbitrary name of his father), and the original African Eve. What it included was everybody, living or dead, who was taxonomically human and born before that first year of Gateway.
That came, as we said, to a grand total of 100,000,000,000 people (give or take quite a lot), of whom the great majority were deceased.
Then along came Heechee, or Heechee-inspired, medicine, and things got started.
The numbers of the living meat people doubled, and doubled again, and kept on doubling. And they lived longer, too. With modern medicine, they didn't die before they wanted to. With medical encouragement and no painful penalties, they generally
and generally lots of them. And when they did Well, when they did 'die' they also still 'lived' in mechanical
storage, and among that growing electronic population there were no fatalities at all.
So the number of the living continued to increase, while the number of the truly dead remained essentially static, and the result was inevitable. But when the point was reached it still took everyone by surprise; for at last in human history the living outnumbered the dead.
All of that had some interesting consequences. The eighty-year-old woman writing her X-rated memoirs of youthful indiscretions couldn't drop the names of video stars, gangsters, and bishops anymore-not unless the indiscretions had really happened, anyway-because the video stars, gangsters, and bishops were still around to correct the record.
It was a great plus for the oldest persons in machine storage,
though. The names that they dropped from their meat days were
well and truly dead, and in no condition to dispute the stories.
It wasn't bad to be a
