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Synopsis

Nemo's mother and father left him behind to enter "the Bin"—joining twelve billion uploaded personalities who live in crime-free, disease-free and deathless virtual societies.

Nemo has come of age on a dangerous, near-deserted planet populated by a handful of stragglers: religious fundamentalists and rebels, the creeps and the crazies.

Now he is twenty-one. And on a rare, reluctant visit to the parents who abandoned flesh and son for cyber-utopia, Nemo has met the perfect woman: a new Bin arrival named Justine, a beautiful pop singer who dreams other people's dreams in the virtual night.

Excerpt

Prologue

Newman Rogers had been erratic lately, despondent, flying into a rage over nothing, working into

the wee hours of the morning. His coworkers would often find him sleeping on the sofa in the

waiting room when they came into work in the morning, or even slumped over his computer. He

was brilliant, a genius perhaps, but he was only one member of a team working to develop artificial

intelligence and was not thought to be indispensable. Whatever he was working on so

compulsively--he didn't share it with the rest of the team--soon prompted him to cease work

altogether on the job he was hired to do. Management was concerned.

And then, on a mid-December afternoon in 2020, he was fired for calling his supervisor an idiot.

He was thirty nine, well thought of until recently, but under the terms of his contract he couldn't

work on artificial intelligence research for any other firm for a period of two years, even though

every other firm would only be interested in him for such research.

None of this seemed to concern him, however. He holed up in his apartment and continued to

work, hacking his former employer's system late at night. A few months after his dismissal, he

published an obscure paper demonstrating, with a string of elegant proofs, that artificial intelligence

was impossible. He added, however, in a modest concluding paragraph, that it might be possible to

digitize human personality and, building on techniques already in use in medicine and virtual reality

simulations, transfer the personality to another organism, or even to another, more durable, medium

altogether.

While competing theorists flung themselves at his proofs like a pack of skilled dogs, a small group

of wealthy and aging businessmen contacted him and offered to finance his research. Suddenly he

found himself in charge of a team of researchers with almost limitless resources. In 2030, the first

practical application of his work, the transfer of the identity of a ninety-seven-year-old owner of a

large insurance company into the quick-grown clone of a healthy young man, was performed with

complete success. Even young men eventually die, however, and Newman was encouraged to

continue developing a more durable medium for human intelligence.

To help finance this venture, his backers, over his objections, marketed Constructs--humans made

from portions of several different personalities implanted into a cloned body--as servants and

laborers. To overcome customers' uneasiness with what some described as the new slavery, the

clones, with increasingly clever, even entertaining gene splices, were made to look as if they

weren't human. Unfortunately (and as Newman had predicted) the partial personalities that made up

each Construct reconstituted themselves over the years, remembering their former lives and

identities.

In 2040, Rogers succeeded in designing the Alternative Life Medium Assembly, ALMA for short, a

vast network of silicon crystals in which any number of human personalities might dwell in a world

they would experience as indistinguishable from the real world. The operating system could be

programmed to eliminate disease, violence, and death--and it would last forever. He had invented

paradise.

The new world government, shakily formed in 2036, sold the former site of the Pentagon for the

construction of ALMA, dubbed "the Bin" by the media, a nickname that stuck. In 2050 it went

on-line, and some half a million souls who could afford it entered their new world. In 2060, after

ten years of mounting pressure from residents of the real world, ALMA was opened up to everyone

eighteen years or older who did not scan as criminally insane. By 2074, the Supreme Court (the

majority of whom now re sided in the Bin) lifted the ban against minors, so that anyone, young and

old alike, might enter the Bin and live forever.

After a few years, the only people left in the real world were members of religious sects who

believed the Bin to be in violation of God's laws; the criminally insane; and a handful of persons

who, for one reason or another, stubbornly distrusted paradise. By 2080, the remaining population

of the real world, not counting Constructs, was about 2.5 million, though reliable figures were hard

to come by. The population of the Bin was over 12 billion.

As for Newman Rogers, the patron saint of ALMA, no one knew where he was or what he was

doing, though rumors were plentiful.

Copyright © 1998 by Dennis Danvers

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