The train from Irkutsk to Novosibirsk. I watch a movie and still my appetite with instant noodles just like all the other passengers I can see since I can’t look into the first class waggons where caviar feasts and wodka deliria would shorten subjective travel time for upper class Russians. It is nice though to imagine it. Big cigars, caviar scooped out of emerald inlaid glistering Fabergé eggs, Russian newspapers unread on the beech table, a full ashtray making a rattling sound as it jumps to the rhythm of the train. They are telling each other stories, they are drinking good wine. All this tickles our imagination and behold! in our dreams the Fabergé eggs are greener and bigger and the sturgeon eggs are tastier and everything is brighter in the dreams we dream on the berches. Philosophical aspect of which is that our train needs to drag along a closed waggon with an imaginative upper-class brasserie with some more equal pigs. It provides some weight, prevents derailment, keeps the blood of the ordinary passengers flowing towards hope and hoist their spirits.
A STORY OF HIGH SCIENCE FICTION, CHEESY TO SOME, THRILLING TO MOST
It is the year 4976 and mankind is still stuck on planet earth. We are nearly 3000 years in the Cryocene but we are still waiting for our major breakthrough. It seems that it will take a lot more millenia before we can develop the technology to leave this solar system and colonize another one. We just have to wait. That’s what wise men have told us over and over again, but many brave youngsters have acted with vigorous decisiveness – and failed. Most of them died in space as near as Saturn. It was such a waste. You know that dying has been abolished in the Cryocene. Risking your life was supposed to be something typically human, and many still find something appealing about it. I couldn’t tell. Not that I’m not human, I just don’t risk my life because I know. I know what will be the only possible way for mankind to survive.
We have 15 billion minds now, about as much as at the beginning of the Cryocene. Most people freeze when they turn forty. The body is still healthy then and relatively easy to preserve. There are discounts for it if you freeze with forty. Anyway, the problem I see is that the waiting is going to be hard. How can we preserve our humantiy, not only our flesh? Boredom has attacked some three centuries ago and it ressembled the black death, spreading rapidly and driving many towards suicide. You know who I am, don’t you? The great-great-etcetera grandson of Aldous Huxley. I am working on a special program to tackle the problem of boredom. We will create some kind of garden and raise two human beings there, Edam and Gouda. When they have reached the reproductive age we will try to seduce them with cryotechnology and eternal life. I am very interested in what their reaction might be. Will they reject it out of some sort of reverence of their garden lifes? Will they happily accept it? And above all: will they develop a sense of “sin” when they do accept it? O god, this is so exciting…