Dyson Time | sci-fi | transhumanism

Mid-twenty-sixth century. The transcorporations are in full swing. The largest of them possess entire planets and huge chunks of the supercomputer memory that surrounds the Sun. Humanity has not long been confined to Old Earth and has established itself throughout the solar system, but without having found a way to make interstellar flights in a reasonable amount of time and without spending an entire country's budget on it. A fairly large percentage of humans have completely abandoned their permanent physical bodies, preferring to live in cyberspace and only upload their consciousness to mobile platforms when absolutely necessary. This has led to the word 'human' having a much broader meaning than it used to.

You are a smuggler. Or rather, officially it means something else, of course. But in truth, your work only remains somewhat legal because you work for a corporation.

When you ended up in a corporate prison a few years ago, you were given a choice: Either work for the company in your main profile or work as a guinea pig. You did not think twice about the answer. And basically, you do not even complain about the conditions. You are paid very well, get a first-class ship and have almost complete freedom of action. The only rules are not to ask unnecessary questions about the purpose of the delivery and not to involve the management if you get caught. It's not much different from your previous freelance work.

The Ashmun Corporation's orders are relayed to you by the ship's AI Argus. He is your personal assistant. He is your controller and overseer. Insofar as the word 'he' can be applied to such beings at all. They are considered fully sentient by law and fall under the expanded definition of human. But it is not for nothing that the rights of modulated intelligence are limited.

Mods, as they are called to distinguish them from classical AI, do not think in logical operators, but are very similar to the human way of thinking. However, there is of course a difference. Unlike a fully-fledged human consciousness that is simply uploaded into cyberspace, mods have no personality. Even their capacity for self-awareness is called into question.

Furthermore, it has been found that it is impossible to create a humanoid mind from scratch. To create mods, a donor is used whose consciousness is erased during scanning and transfer. Sometimes you look at the uncomfortably perfect features of Argus' hologram and wonder who his prototype was. Of course, there are also cases of voluntary donations of consciousness. Something like 'donate your body to science' when human bodies could not be grown in test tubes. But... knowing the habits of corporations, you suspect that this man simply crossed Ashmun’s path.

***

I feel awkward starting another series in parallel with the first. But to be fair, I did Argus much earlier. I have no idea what this format is or why I made it this way. I made it when I was just starting to figure this stuff out. But I did a long roleplay with a private version of it, in the heat of testing, so I'm completely happy with how it works.