[ExI] uploads etc.

[Keith Henson]

Page 5 of 6

Suskulan had expected this question. "I, Suskulan, can augment the
spirits in your powerful fetishes. Placed around your gardens on tall
poles they will chatter like a monkey if someone approaches who is not
of the tata."

Suskulan's image wavered into a more unsubstantial translucent mode.
The village elders quickly agreed to bring him a number of fetishes to
be "augmented."

By the next evening, he had a dozen fetish skulls and the 2-meter
poles to hold them placed inside the clinic.  Suskulan's fog of
nanomachines equipped each of the skulls with eyes, a solar power
collector hat, power storage and a local area transceiver plus enough
utility fog to serve as local actuators.

Image 4 - Skulls

There was argument that night if men or women should plant the poles
so they asked Suskulan.

"Children," he told them.  "Three boys and three girls."  He told them
that Zaba should be included.

Zaba and five other older children took the ward poles out to the
garden, planting the first few along the path at 50-meter intervals
where they could serve as relays.   Zaba was delighted she could
spirit talk to Suskulan through the ward poles all the way to the
garden.  Suskulan directed where the ward poles should be planted
through her.

It was prudent that the children planted the ward poles and that the
adults didn't get a good look at them.  Suskulan had indulged his
sense of humor by regenerating skin and hair on the fetish skulls and
placing eyes in the sockets that disturbingly rolled this way and
that.

In the week after the poles were planted, they grew roots like the
ones that had anchored the clinic seed when it first sprouted.  The
poles grew dark leaves for solar collectors and the fetishes were able
to rotate on the pole.  (An artistic flourish since they had eyes in
the back and sides of the head as well as the front.)  All of the
poles became strong beyond belief as Suskulan's remote controlled
assemblers laid down nanotube fibers. [1] Two of them telescoped up
ten meters over a period of weeks to get a wide area view.

Who had shot Zaba remained a mystery.  Suskulan and the neighboring
clinics never located a suspect.

December 2043

The next dry season was almost as brutal as the first.  Suskulan was
asked about supplying the tata with food.  He explained that was
beyond what he was permitted to do.  Food again was in short supply.
Suskulan restored fat on children several at a time.  Instead of their
being unconscious while it was done, or talking only to him, he let
them play together in the spirit world, their bodies cooled to near
freezing and experiencing ten hours for every real time hour.

Suskulan had enough distributed processing now that wire frame body
images had been replaced by polygons, better than cartoons but
simplified compared to real life.  The physics model was earth
standard even to the point of pain from running into a spirit world
tree.

The children who were so inclined were offered instruction.  Most of
the children learned enough to manipulate the web cameras where they
could look out at places across the world and as far out as
geosynchronous orbit and to play games (of which there was a huge
variety) in the spirit world.  Eventually they discovered the library
that could show them movies.

They finally understood the mysterious fixed lights in the sky that
had appeared ten years before as "solar power satellites," or "power
sats" that converted sunlight into microwaves beamed to giant
receivers on earth.  There were many "rectennas" in Europe and Asia,
but the infrastructure to use huge blocks of power was missing south
of the Sahara.

In spite of efforts by the children to keep their extra vision secret,
the adults figured out the children could see through the ward poles
because it became impossible to sneak up on one of the children if
they were near the garden.

The adults asked Suskulan how it was done and could they get it too?
Shortly the older children had to move away from the garden if they
wanted privacy for sex.

Then they discovered that sex in the spirit world was more fun,
especially after they talked Suskulan into locally reducing the
gravity in the physics models.  (Sex in the simulation had no
biological consequences. Producing food out of the simulation or
producing babies in the simulated world were two built in limits
Suskulan had no desire to break.)

By the end of the dry season, the tata inhabitants were spending half
their time with their bodies in a very cold state deep under the
clinic and their minds in the spirit world--which now sported a copy
of the tata sitting in the middle of an otherwise uninhabited world.
With the start of the wet season and the need to plant and maintain
the physical-world houses all of them were out of the clinic for a few
months except when they needed it for medical reasons.

Expecting him to say no, the tata elders asked Suskulan if he could
make their houses more resistant to the rain.  To their surprise,
Suskulan agreed and poured a large store of fuel and molecular parts
into weather proofing the mud dwellings with tiny diamond sheets.
The houses didn't look much different after Suskulan worked on them
(unless you caught the light at just the right angle) but they were as
proof against the weather as the clinic walls.

Just before the next dry season arrived, Suskulan got another update,
and with the additional processing he installed, life within the
"spirit world" became very much like that outside in attention to
detail.  (Except no bedbugs, lice or mosquitoes!)

December 2044

With the start of the dry season, more and more of the tata members
spent most of their time in the spirit world, sometimes sleeping there
and only coming out to work the gardens or harvest.  With
substantially fewer people eating, the granaries filled up.  That and
weather proofing the houses further reduced the need to spend a lot of
time in the physical world.

May 2045

Just after the wet season started a "mole" laying an optical fiber
burrowed into the tata linking Suskulan to the rest of the clinics.
No longer limited by satellite bandwidth and latency, his "patients"
could travel by optical fiber and experience the virtual or physical
world any place on the planet while their bodies lay in Suskulan's
underground extension.  Few of them were interested in going outside
of their language group, even with excellent translation services
(Zaba was an exception).  But they did use "seven league boots" to
visit relatives in other tatas, something that had been curtailed
since the pox years.

At the same time those in the spirit world were allowed to change the
simulation, locally for their own consciousness or if they wanted to
change public parts by consensus.  The spirit world tata didn’t change
much, but the inside of the dwellings became larger than the outside
as Suskulan relaxed the physics rules on request.

Zaba often talked to Suskulan.  She eventually acquired a top-level
understanding of all of human knowledge and had access to the details
through simulated memory.  Suskulan warned her that she might have a
difficult time in the physical world if she got out of communication
because her mind had expanded well beyond what could be supported in a
brain.

"Why would I want to go back to being stupid?" she responded, but,
after thinking about it, she warmed up her body and moved her
consciousness back into her original brain.  Her boyfriend was deep in
a game and would not come along.  (She had a boyfriend because the
older man her parents expected to marry her to had lost interest after
asking for and being given half a dozen simulated concubines.)

Zaba was one of the few Suskulan permitted to be in the physical state
in his underground extensions.  He was not concerned about the safety
of his racks of freezing cold patients, supported as they were in a
web of nanomachines.  He just didn’t want those who did not want to
know how they went in and out of the spirit world to be concerned
about the underlying physical details.


She rode up the elevator and left the clinic and the spirit world for
a day.  Walking beyond the reach of the local net was a disconcerting
experience at first but even without the net, Zaba's mind was
impressive.  She remembered what Suskulan had said about staying awake
and learning while being healed and how it would change her and the
people of the tata.

It certainly had!

For better or for worse?

For better in that nobody died of fevers, nasty parasites, or
malnutrition since Suskulan had come into their lives.  People didn't
even die of old age with a clinic to regress age for them and they
aged in the spirit world only to the extent they wanted.

For worse in that she could not have children unless she left the
clinic for their gestation.  Zaba had read the design notes that led
up to the creation of the clinics and their spirits and had long
understood the mathematics behind Suskulan's limits.  In the long run,
births and deaths had to match.  If you wanted no deaths, then there
could be no births.

Since fetal development was arrested while in the clinic, (but not
post-birth growth) a number of families stuck it out until a child was
born, then moved back into the more attractive spirit world tata to
raise the child.

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Zaba visited with the few remaining families in person, then returned
to the clinic and the spirit world.  She was not inclined to leave it
again.

December 2045

By the start of the dry season in 2045 the presence of physical-state
humans was rare, not just in the tata Suskulan served, but also in a
wave moving south along the routes Lothar, Mabo and their fellow
clinic seed planters had traveled so long ago.  Suskulan used
extensions made of utility fog to keep the leaves and fallen palm
fronds swept out of the tata.  The weatherproofed tata required little
other maintenance.

May 2046

A few months after the last family from the tata moved into the spirit
world with no intent to come out, Suskulan rounded up the tata's
elders.   Some of them were living in simulated palaces with dozens of
simulated servants and companions.

Taking on his translucent vestige from his first meeting with them, he
addressed the group in a simulation of the physical-world clinic.

"Remember the leopard who pissed on Lothar's Land Rover when he
brought the clinic seed to your tata?"

They did and laughed at the memory.

"That leopard has been nosing around the empty physical-world tata."

Suskulan showed them video of the large curious cat cautiously
investigating the neatly maintained but empty tata.

"The physical-world tata is your property, and for that matter, the
clinic that is Suskulan is your property."  Suskulan reminded them,
"You exchanged a valuable fetish for it."   The elders accepted this,
though it made them a bit uncomfortable.

"Would you mind if the leopard slept in one of the houses?"

"Will you chase him out when we go back to visit the physical world?"
one of them asked.

With assurances from Suskulan that he would run the leopard off
anytime anyone ventured back into the physical-world tata they said
the leopard could sleep in the tata.

The tata was home to the leopard for the rest of his life.