Uladzimir Kulikou
Stories (1/0)
On Salt
On our drive across Eastern Europe, Aubin and I found ourselves in Krakow and decided to stop for a few days to look at some castles and the ancient salt mines. On one of the evenings there, we found a restaurant and were escorted to a table next to a foggy window. Rain fell against a dim streetlamp and every drop that landed on the window did so with a tired agony of spirits from the past. We took off our heavy coats and hung them on the olive velvet chairs. Aubin ordered an orange old fashioned, and I asked for a small decanter of vodka and a plate of gherkins. Once our waiter returned, Aubin and I cheerlessly raised our glasses to the past and thus our communion begun. I inhaled my drink and bit into the salty gherkin. Aubin licked his lips and lit a smoke, while I, having satisfied the first itch of a craving, looked around the empty room. An electric chandelier softly threw its light on oak tables and fake tulips, while an old record-player was rasping in the back. A sign in Polish read, ‘Smaczniej Niż Nieśmiertelność.’ Ever since the successful merging of individual human consciousness with artificial intelligence, most people decided to transition themselves onto the cloud, thus eliminating with a single stroke both suffering and death. Those who decided to opt out of the Transition of Human Intelligence program, were left to decline immortality and walk towards the cool shadows of death. At first, the heavenly cloud provided its virtual dwellers a painless and divine existence, but over time the novelty of such intangibility wore off and the immortals decided to return from their heavens onto the earth. But they were unwilling to sacrifice their immortality, and since artificial simulations proved inadequate, they decided, in an act of switcheroo, to merge artificial intelligence with harvested biological bodies, creating a future version of Frankenstein’s creature. Synths, as they came to be known, repopulated the earth and once again could enjoy the physical melting of an ice cube in their mouths. This, I learned as part of early education, and later, that the synths used a cryogenically preserved supply of sperm to artificially inseminate and grow biological bodies in labs, and, in the process, took precautions to allow a percentage of those bodies to mature and develop their own individual consciousness, unmarred by those from the cloud, in order to avoid the depletion of sperm banks. Synths are infertile and so I was born in a lab – unclouded and mortal.
By Uladzimir Kulikou3 years ago in Fiction