Intergalactic Summit

- Intaki Immortalist Anheri Salqua.


I was 17 when I met Aidan Asgath, the man I had thought would become my husband. For the last four years, I'd been working as a street girl, a dancer, and a drug dealer, my life had begun a long slow slide into what likely would have been an early grave. Aidan changed all that. Blonde haired with deep green eyes, he was the day to my night. Our relationship progressed quickly, and the impact he had on my life cannot be understated. Though I still worked as a prostitute and stripper, he began to pull me out of that life. With his help, I was able to attend the CBD training school, and by the time I was 19, I was able to set aside my old past, working a legitimate and well paying job doing QA for the CBD mine that formed the heart of our city.

Aidan died in YC109. During the Food Riots following the crash of the elevator car, he'd gone out to join the protesters, and for his trouble took a rubber bullet in the gut. Instead of bouncing, it penetrated and tore apart his digestive system. Despite our best attempts to save him, he bled out on our kitchen table, I watched the light fade from his eyes, until they were empty and unseeing. It was then that I truly understood what it meant to die, and I hated it.

The hate ate and tore at me, fuelling my descent back into a drug addled haze. Aidan's death left a gaping hole in my heart, one that I filled with rage and anger at those I viewed as responsible. When the Angel Cartel came to Skarkon early the next year, I had already slid back among their ranks, and during the annexation, they gave me an opportunity to seek vengeance for Aidan's death.

The man responsible for his death was, in my mind, the captain of the spacelane patrol security, the one who ordered his men to open fire on the crowd. The first and last time I met him was in a dusty alley off a deserted street. He was bound and gagged. A cold metal firearm was pressed into my hand, and I blew his brains out. But the thing was, it didn't help me. Not really. As I watched his blood flow out of him, the rage I felt faded, and instead of the wound left my Aidan's death closing, it was just made all the obvious when I could no longer use my anger to hide it. I broke down on the ground there, and cried. The man I had killed had died for nothing. It didn't bring Aidan back, nothing would do that.

My drug use really took off at that point. I filled the void left with Drop, Crash and anything else that would make me forget the pain. When the Angels left Skarkon, they offered to take me with them, having been in and out of the gang for eight years by that point. I probably would have, but my life took an unexpected turn. My DNA had been sequenced by the CBD corporation when I took a job with them, and they discovered my capsule compatibility. Two men approached me, and made me the offer to go with them, and become a capsuleer on a charity grant from the republic.

In school, I did well, but I remained with the angels, quietly selling drugs between classes, helping smuggle things in and out of station, odd jobs that maintained my connection to that world. When I graduated, it was to return to that world. I did many things while a part of the cartel that I look back on with horror and disgust. I participated in the destruction of the Genesis vaults, I performed cruel experiments in mockery of true science. Between the drugs, and the camaraderie that angels provided, I was able to justify the horrible things I did.

It was in the light of the fires that destroyed Rilnais, that I finally broke free of that life and the horror at what I had been involved in set in. I set about trying to be better, to make amends, but nothing would undo the damage I had done. I couldn't bring back the people I had killed anymore then I could bring back Aidan. They were gone.

The more time that has passed since those days, the more I realize I am far from unique. My experiences are probably all too common. The spectre of death hangs over all of us, snatching away those we care about one by one by one. The fact that we can ponder the infinite cosmos yet we’re ultimately food for worms, I find heart wrenchingly paralysing, depressing, sad beyond all measurable limits. The idea that everything and everyone you love is going to be taken away from you, is unacceptable to me.

Now, some people would say that death is just a part of nature and should simply be accepted, but I feel that's dodging the issue. There are plenty of things that are natural that we consider unacceptable. All of our science and medicine exists because the natural world isn't perfect, it isn't engineered and neither are we. Natural selection doesn't optimize, and it doesn't care for our feelings. We should no more accept death then we accepted our planetbound existences.

We have the tools now. We can create a world without loss, without these encounters with grief, and that may sound like a manic fantasy of sorts, but I think that that’s what humankind has always done through our art is articulate our desire to be eternal, to be infinite. Intaki artist Ellun en Delumo said, “nothing is real that is not eternal.” So we write poetry and we build cathedrals that try to create transcendence as a topographical statement, that’s why we eternalize beautific moments and create gorgeous statues and write amazing songs; we long to immortalize ourselves, we want to carve our names, we want to say, I WAS HERE, I FELT SOMETHING, AND I MATTER. And we do matter, if not to the universe then to each other. And that’s why death has become an imposition on humanity, and is no longer acceptable.

ok

Because he too has a transhumanist utopia agenda?

It is a common misconception that a world without death is one without loss. The casualty of immortality is the part of you that struggles so valiantly to stay alive.


If you think the animal inside you, the one that wants to live above all things, is yet stirring .... give it some time. It will fade as the years press on.

And then, you will want to die.

Let's suppose that by some miracle of spacetime folding we were able to send a reporter back in time to interview my five-year-old self. He could have scored a riveting journalistic coup on the adventures of my favourite toys.

Maybe he'd then interview my fifteen-year-old self, who, I'll be honest, was a smart-aleck bully swaggering around on too much newly-acquired testosterone, picking on my classmates and risking an unwise and early fatherhood among the gym equipment with too many girlfriends.

Then Interview my thirty-year-old self, all duty and courage and honour, invincible behind Ishukone Watch SWAT-team armour and built around a solid pole of iron and Heiian that got shoved up my ass and left there.

Interview me now, pushing fifty years old. Empyrean Billionaire, investor, industrialist and expert in Sleeper systems cryptography, and an object of both esteem and contempt depending on who you ask.

Where did each Verin go? Are they dead? If so, then there is no practical difference between clone and non-clone. We all change, all the time. We all die, all the time. Living, second-by-second, means abandoning our past selves and embracing the new sense of self, rarely even noticing that we have done so. The fact that we can put a timestamp on the arbitrary moment when the sense of self ceases to be sited there and begins to be sited here is irrelevant.

If they are not dead, then neither is the Verin who was in-pod the last time I got splattered. I have far more in common with him than I do with the teenaged jock who only thought with his muscles and his ****.

The self is a process, it is the subjective feeling of continuity. I think I am Yakiya Verin Hakatain, therefore I am Yakiya Verin Hakatain. The essential core of Infomorph psychology is that nothing beyond that statement matters.

The five-year-old who could talk for a whole day about the Galaxy Rangers and Robot Rampage is effectively dead: he doesn't exist any more as he did then. And yet I don't see anybody mourning for the death of that child.

The "real you" is whatever entity happens to be thoroughly convinced that she is you. I know that Lieutenant Hakatain of the Watch Tanto-33 team would look at me and wonder "could this possibly be the same man?". He might look at my clone's brain, composed entirely of synthetic synapses, and question whether I realise that I am already a naked sense of self that only inhabits a given specimen of hardware out of habit and expediency.

The answer of course is that yes, I do realise that: the knowledge does not bother me in the slightest. I could, if I so wished, upload myself to computer networks and abandon a humanoid form outright: I do not so wish.

I may, in the future, change my mind. Or I may not. That's a decision for Verins who don't yet exist.

Death is the cessation of that continuity of self, and I personally think that striving to stop it outright is doomed to failure. There's an old engineering principle: "anything that can go wrong, eventually will."

Whether by entropy, technical malfunction or simple incredible bad luck, I will one day cease to be. Whether that day is tomorrow or trillions of years hence in a designer universe on the far side of the reality membrane doesn't change the outcome, I'd just prefer the latter on the grounds that in my book, to exist is better than to not exist, and that it's therefore a good idea to strive to exist for as long as possible.

But we all have to go sometime. I don't see any particular good to be accomplished from stressing about it.

And, because, from my current point of view, the opinion of that future entity if she is really me or not does not matter in the slightest, for an individual consciousness there is no death. There is only life, with no beginning or end, a process of existence at the given point in time.

For himself, everyone is immortal. The only consequence of death in our life, a shadow, is our fear of an imaginary death, because most of us can not understand it properly - or, to understand that, while we are, there is no death, and the second after we are no more and something else exists, as immortal as the one that has passed -- or that may never existed at all. There is nothing to fear in nothing.

What exists to some degree is an observer's image of a human personality as it develops over time. It is the outside society that connects the infinite number of dots into something that we see as a lifeline. Look what a truly free Minmatar has to say:



It is other people that create us in their imagination, that make us what we are, and for them - and only for them, not for us, our death does exist.

Miss Kernher, I've been sort of curious about something since the time we talked about this topic. What are you feelings about the implants clone soldiers utilize? Where the brain is kept "Running" in a linked fashion in both the physical brain, and in hardware at the cloning bay, so death results in no interruption of consciousness at all, or rather, no "copying", per se - Despite the original source of said consciousness being destroyed.

Would you consider this true immortality? Because it is my understanding that Saede prefers stuff of this vein to the technology utilized by Capsuleers.

There is an unspoken assumption here that death is the end of existence, instead of a transition to a different one.


It is not an assumption I am comfortable making. Not yet, anyway.

Hmm. The death of Death seems to be a popular topic lately.
I think a world without loss is impossible, but a world without grief could be achieved nonetheless.

Viewing certain things as unacceptable, however, sets you up to experience grief, as do desires and attachments. Avoid them to avoid grief.

Peace,

-Ché