I love watching people on the wave argue about things. It doesnt even matter what things. Could be the most meaningless turn of phrase, or how the current government is worse than the previous. So long as there are two people willing to go at it, I will sit there and watch every single time.
My grandfather said he used to do something similar, back before. When he was my age. We were all back on the planet in those days. Not me, obviously, but people. Humans. I was born up here, but you knew that.
My grandfather would go to places where people congregated. He said he would set himself up with some food and drink in the middle of these places and he would just watch people as they went past him. He lived for the days when a couple would start an argument nearby. He would make sure they didnt think he was listening and they would just have at it. Like they were the only people in the world.
Him and I, we both like that. When people get so caught up in their own thing, they forget that there are others all around them. He laughed when I said that. He said that, as a species, we do that too. We forget that there is more out there than just humans and we have to stop thinking that were the only ones out there. Who knows whos watching us.
My grandfather is one of the people here who werent born aboard this ship. Those people are fewer and fewer now, but he is still as lively as ever. Still independent too.
Of course, I still head up to his level to see him every other day. Just to check in and make sure everything is fine. He says he doesnt need it, but I can tell, he appreciates the attention.
It was one of these visits a few months ago when he sat me down and he told me a story. We had just finished talking about all the people we had seen arguing and he had made his comment about someone watching humans like we watched each other.
He told me another story about his younger days, back before. He said it was a cautionary tale. Of course I listened to him. I took in each word he said. And now Im writing it here just to have a record of it. Or maybe its a test. These next words are his story, as word for word as I can remember, but the idea is all there.
We were about a quarter of the way into the new century. People my age had been promised everything. If we put ourselves to the task, we would be rewarded. It was the great lie of my generation and, had it not been for the change, it would be you poor souls who would have had to clean up the mess.
People my age were promised that the ever advancing progress of technology would make our lives easier. That we would have more time with our families, with our friends and our hobbies and less time at work. Our lives would get easier and we would pass that on to our children.
Our mistake was to let greed override any proper use of these tools. We let a scramble for money win over the needs of the people. My wife, not your grandmother, she comes later, and I were well educated people. We were on the cutting edge of our respective fields. She even went on to get her Doctorate, but that was after she left me. We were young. We were doing everything they said we needed to. We had jobs. But we couldnt afford a house. We certainly couldnt afford children.
And then came the first artificial intelligence revolution. Computers we created and we designed. We knew they werent actually AI, but that didnt stop the marketers. They pushed and pushed and pushed and these things were everywhere. My wife and I, we hated them. Our apartment was full of little gadgets that were meant to make our lives easier. A doorbell that called our phones when we werent home and someone came to visit. Those things never worked the way they were meant to. The cameras were all screwy and we could never reach the customer service line.
Everything had to have a connection to the internet, thats what you kids call the wave now. I guess you have to be different up here. The TV, not that you know what one of those is, the fridge, dishwasher, washing machine. Even the little robot vacuum. Everything was connected and online. A lot of people thought this was amazing. But we knew otherwise. Every connection to the internet was a point of failure. Eventually these gadgets wouldnt work without the internet. Then hacking them to make them work without the internet was criminalised. I was arrested more than once for helping people screw with their appliances.
I cant help but wonder what would have happened next if they hadnt shown up.
Its me again. I need to interrupt this story here because I already know that everything here is wrong, or not what were taught. Our educational databases on the wave dont talk about a ‘first’ AI revolution. Theres nothing about our own attempts at creating tools that help us like he describes.
I said as much to him and he shook his head sadly. He said it was removed. That those of us up here wouldnt learn about the bad parts of our history. He talked about a number of other things that he learned about when he was in school and none of them mean anything to me.
We’re taught about the immediate period before our ship launched, so we have context for being up here, but nothing from before. I know there is heaps before, but they said we dont need to worry about it. My grandfather said he will give me some proper history lessons one day, when Im ready. Ready for what? Anyway, his story isnt finished.
You have to understand that my peeve with this AI nonsense that was thrown around when I was younger doesnt mean I was anti-progress, or anti-technology. But, as I came out of university, I was led down a path where I started to ask questions about the purpose of these things.
As the not-AI grew, I noticed that none of the benefits ever made it to me. The time I spent with my loved ones, or on my hobbies never increased. Neither did my payrate. In fact, all of those things decreased. The not-AI was blamed. They said things like ‘since these tools are able to do so much of your job without your input, we need you to do all this other work to ensure a full time schedule.’ The people who used the tools used them to keep people like me and you under their thumb. Every company that hired people like me churned through staff. One company would close its doors and another doing the exact same thing with the exact same people would open the following week. Everyone was tired all the time.
But there were actually exciting things happening. Technology, in general, was getting better. There were definitely uses for it that I found. I had to make sure that it worked for me first and foremost, but by the time our new friends arrived, that was trivial. My house – I had inherited my parents one at this point – was a beacon of how to use tech properly. My non-tech friends couldnt make heads or tails of it, but each time they came to visit, they always commented at the lack of adverts they saw when they used my wifi. I always said that I could do the same for them in less than an hour, but none of them ever took me up on that.
My focus at that time was space tech. Watching the iterations of various spacefaring vehicles and their tribulations as we tried to get to where we are now was something of an obsession of mine, and its how I met your grandmother.
There was a launch, a very big deal, the first time that people would be launched into space, out to Mars and back again. They werent going to land out there, but they would go out and come back. It was treated as a big deal for so many reasons, but I wanted to go because it was close to where I was living and a close friend of mine had worked on some of the systems. They had given me a plus one to get into the launch facility itself.
You know the story here, your grandmother was a colleague of my friend and we were introduced right before the launch and we got to watch it together. Our most treasured memory.
But you dont know about that mission. You dont know that those astronauts never made it home. They were dead long before they reached Mars, and because of that the ship failed to orbit the red planet and now that dusty hellhole is their grave for eternity.
They dont teach you that. Which means they dont teach you why that ship failed. Which means you cant know what mistakes not to make next time. Not that it does you any good up here, but the point is, you miss out on so much when people control what you learn.
Which brings me to the others. Obviously we called them aliens when they first arrived. They have their own species names, of course, but now we just call them The Others. You know this. They came from outer space and they saved humanity.
Saved. Have you seen how we live? Secluded in a little piece of artificial paradise that we cant fuck up because they dont want us to do to the artificial world they gave us like we did to our own planet. Theyre treating us like children. We deserve it too. We fucked up so much of our world. Thats more history Ill have to teach you one day. Theyre right to treat us like children.
But they arent the ones who are teaching you. Thats us again. Humans. It wasnt the others who told us to leave things out of the databases. It wasnt the others who severed the wave link back to Earth. It wasnt the others who instituted the max lifespan of humans. Hell, back before we launched, the others told us that we could live forever if we only asked. I bet the people we left back home are all taking advantage of that. While we poor peasants get evicted from our own world and are left to repeat all the same mistakes again.
Its my grandfathers birthday tomorrow and Im told Im not allowed to see him again.