The Before Short Story Series. Part 1 - Иван Перепелятник

we ourselves, you and I, are always online also. Data about our activity, our condition, our medical indicators, everyday habits and daily routine—everything that is peculiar to us is constantly collected, systematised and analysed by PAX. Society on the whole has come to an agreement, to some kind of social contract, to an understanding of why we would allow the system to have access to information about our lives. The launch of the PAX system made it possible to globally stabilise the endless chaos that was happening on the planet in the twenty-first century. Not to mention solutions to age-old problems in the field of energy, ever limited resources, military conflicts. The list of accumulated unresolved problems of the past century could be continued and it will take some time. The solution was proposed by science—deep analysis of big data at the level not accessible by us, humans. PAX has formulated a number of priority proposals, which implementation has allowed us to break the deadlock. What’s the next step? What challenges are awaiting us tomorrow? We, our laboratory, are looking for answers to questions that are not yet relevant to society today.’

‘Wow! Alexandra, what does all this mean? I’m sorry, but your wording is extremely vague and foggy. And what do you think will be relevant for humanity tomorrow? And what is the timeline of this tomorrow? When is it?’

‘First of all, let’s see what we have achieved today as a species. There are about twelve billion people living on the planet. We live on six continents, and are well settled there. The demographic pattern has fundamentally changed after the scientific revolution in the field of medicine. Human life expectancy is up to three times higher than similar indicators at the beginning of the last century. This has changed everything—we no longer give birth to children just like that. Should we continue to adhere to the way of life we used to, we wouldn’t have been able to balance the ecosystems on the planet. But now these issues have been resolved. We have an operating base and a colony on the Moon and Mars, totalling ten thousand people. And this is the beginning of a new era for humanity. We start taking our first steps as a species in a new way for ourselves—as explorers and conquerors of new worlds.’

‘Alexandra, if you were speaking on the good old TED platform, I assume that the audience would burst into applause at this moment,’ Thomas smiled. ‘But what do you think will be the next step?’

‘It’s obvious, Thomas—we have to find a way to go beyond the solar system, sooner or later. And this is a complex task. In addition to the colossal engineering challenges that we continue to work on, for example, such fundamental ones as the current speed limits not allowing us to go beyond our star system, or the astronauts life support designed for exceptionally long journeys, for hundreds or even, perhaps, thousands of years. In addition to answering these questions, we must understand how we will populate those new worlds where humanity will come to.’

‘And what is your version of the answer to this textbook question, Alexandra?’

‘We believe that one of the possibilities of travelling infinitely long distances to develop populations in new star systems is of a hybrid basis.’

Thomas was numb for a second, froze motionless, and only his eyelids continued to reflexively perform the function assigned to them by evolution. Coming back to his senses, he continued:

‘Wow! What’s the core of such a hybrid system? Would you tell us, please.’

‘We proceed from the fact that in the near future humankind will be not only biological species, but also completely digital ones, which would allow us to remove many barriers and restrictions that we cannot overcome now.’

‘Alexandra, if I understand correctly, you are working on a possibility to place a digitized human consciousness, for example, in a robot, in some kind of mechanical device? Is that how it works?’

‘That’s about it, Thomas.’

‘To be honest, I couldn’t have imagined, preparing for our meeting, that the interview would take such a turn.’

‘I’m glad we’re having an interesting conversation, Thomas.’

‘Of course! Now, I think, the connection between your development of the Interview software package and the large project you have described, becomes clear—this is a step in the implementation of the program.’

‘You’re absolutely right, Thomas. The formation of a digital model of the person’s personality, based on information about one’s life and big data, is an opportunity to reliably assess the degree of readiness of the Interview module for the next stage of the implementation of the main task.’

‘I understand your experiments are going well. Digital models are credible, reliable—do they really work?’

‘Yes and no, Thomas. Things are going, of course, not as fast as we would like. And if it were so simple, it would have hardly caused public interest and your curiosity. At the moment, we provide stable functioning of only one model—my long-perished brother.’

‘Now?! Your brother?’ Thomas said, showing surprise.

‘My brother’s digital model—his name was Igor—is stable. The nuance here is that I have been investigating the cause of his death for a long time and have collected a large database of everything that somehow correlates with his life. Besides, it’s obvious that I knew him well. We were very close. When we realised that the digital personality models we were trying to recreate were not working, their stability was no good, and their credibility was low, I decided that we should try to run a model based on my brother’s data archive. Our tests confirmed that this was the right step. It worked.’

‘Alexandra, to be honest, all this looks somewhat strange and even frightening. Your brother, who died a long time ago, has now come to life, so to speak, in his new digital incarnation. How do you communicate with him? I understand that you can