Story #17 - Life in the Long Now

We have only scratched the surface of what computers will do for us.

Hi! Gonna be a short intro this week, as this is a long story for me. My apologies for the late arrival. I got started late on this, it ended up being longer than I expected it to be, and I got really tired and fell asleep last night! Continued perils of being a one-man operation. Anyway, hope you enjoy!

Life in the Long Now

“Welcome to the Long Now. What you are part of will, in time, completely rearrange the concept of human life, on every level, for all time. For now, there is resistance, and it’s understandable. Those who left Europe to colonize America also met with fierce resistance. Yet the prize we will claim, that you will begin claiming today, is greater than a mere New World. When one day, every human who lives, lives a hundredfold timespan of what humans used to expect, they will look back and call us the true pioneers!”

Mindy Toole was part of the first generation to enter the Long Now. When she was fifteen, living in rural Washington hating the rain, they put out the call for volunteers in just her age range. Mindy was desperate to get out, get anywhere but what her brother always called “this shit-splat town”, so she applied, ignoring the fact that there was a ten-year wait involved as only teenagers can ignore problems with their plan. And they accepted. She had no idea why, because she knew she wasn’t extraordinary, but they had.

“Now you’re all twenty-five. Your brains are developed enough, and you’re ready to start living your real lives, in the Long Now. I see a lot of you looking around at each other like it’s the last time you’ll see each other, or perhaps anything at all, but I assure you, that’s not the case. You will look on these faces more than any human has ever looked on any set of faces. And then you’ll start your second millennia.”

Once she was chosen, Mindy stopped her normal high school classes. In the Long Now there would be both ample time to learn and no need to know many things traditionally considered important. Their bodies would be cared for perfectly here Outside, and inside there would be no scarcity—anything imaginable could be provided with mere computing power. Instead of school, Mindy spent her days making her body as healthy as it could possibly be. Each year her physical body could sustain was going to give her a century of life in the Long Now, and even as a teenager, she felt the value of that profoundly. It was worth working to have more of those centuries.

“There will be challenges, no doubt. Ten thousand years is a span of time that is difficult to grasp with the mind, as a concept. It may be challenging to live. The lives of pioneers have always been fraught, just as the rewards have always been great. But you are ready. And you will have a century of lived time to adjust, to learn lessons, and to blaze that trail for the next class that will follow behind you in a year of Outside time.”

Mindy’s brother was angry with her. Their mother and father were furious for five minutes before they disappeared into whatever they got up to when they should have been raising their children, but her brother really cared for her, and he felt abandoned. She was loathe to admit it but he had a point. He would have applied too, but he was already seventeen by the time they recruited the first class, just a bit too old. And so they would not spend their lives together, and he resented her for that. She cried, and felt guilty, and told him that she loved him, but none of it added up to her staying. And even as she cried and he cried and they held each other, she felt excitement gripping her stomach. She’d never been extraordinary before.

“My great regret is that I will not join you in the Long Now. I have created this, but I am too old and my mind is too feeble to withstand the adjustment, I’m afraid. Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I think of the years that I could have lived. My sixty-eight years are a pittance, and even with the best in organ replacement and gene therapies I’ll be luck to live another forty. A measly hundred years. But that will not be your fate. You will escape the tyranny of this empire of mere flesh. That is where I will leave you, and say goodbye, with a reminder that for all the difficulty, and all the challenge, for all it may cost, you are the luckiest people to have ever lived.”

*****

Mindy woke up in an English Country Garden, on a bright, sunny spring morning. Every flower was in bloom. The exact right number of birds were chirping to be noticeable but not annoying. There was a picnic already set with her favorite cookies and tea just the right temperature. She had never been here before, but it seemed familiar, like a dream, one in which she felt safe and in control. 

An exotic bird of brilliant plumage flew across the horizon. She wondered what type it was. As she did, the creature wheeled and turned toward her, straight as an arrow, and landed just a few feet from her, on a stump with a perch-like protrusion that she was sure hadn’t been there only a moment before. The bird spread its wings, displaying said plumage for her, almost dancing with showoff excitement. 

Mindy could feel the name of the the species at the edge of her mind, and she knew if she merely desired to know it, it would break in and appear to her, but she decided that she would rather not know. She returned her gaze to the distance, and when she looked back the bird was gone.

She spent that day alone, secure in the knowledge that the others were out there, living whatever day they had specified as their ideal, getting used to the new feelings. They would have their first Summons in one month, and one every month after that. The Summons was a meeting of a cohort of 25 Initiates of the Long Now. They would have quarterly Meetings in groups of 100, and yearly Convocations of all 1000 class members. They could also meet informally at any time, of course, just by asking for and receiving permission from their desired meeting-partner, but here, at the beginning, they were to be alone and engage in active adjustment to their new surroundings.

Mindy saw an English Farmhouse behind the gardens, plenty large for her but not so large that it wasn’t cozy. Inside she found clothing in her preferred palette, makeup that suited her coloration, and a device that looked like an oven but instead dispensed literally any meal or food, just as she liked it prepared, on command. There were no calories, of course, because her body was being kept alive on minimal recycled nutrients, but so much the better, because she could eat forever without gaining weight or even getting full and it tasted every bit as good as it had Outside!

That night she slept in a bed of perfect firmness, uninterrupted until the sun rose, and woke perfectly refreshed. She spent the next day doing more of the same, relaxing and watching a menagerie of exotic animals amble about her yard. She delighted to conjure animals with her mind and watch them run or fly over the horizon toward her, then stop at her feet and wait to be played with.

There was an ornate bookshelf in her farmhouse, very long, that was stocked with an exhaustive list of all her unread favorites that she’d made before entering the Long Now. The next day, she read poetry under a sun that wasn’t too bright to make her eyes hurt while a family of docile meerkats played at her feet.

After a month of the most truly sublime vacation she could imagine, she found herself ready to commit to an entire 10,000 years of only doing this. But, when the day appeared, she instead put on a lovely blue dress, did a makeup look to match, and went to the Summons.

*****

Everyone else in her cohort had also been busy. They’d been together several times a year for ten years already in the run-up to insertion into the Long Now. She knew their faces well and had missed them, even in the beatific haze of the previous month. Everyone seemed to be a more vivid and styled version of who they’d gone in as. 

Her best friend in the cohort was Bex, a mouthy punk from North London, who’d favored barely-ripped jean jackets with sad little safety pins unimaginatively clipped into them. Now she wore all black, with leather and silver zippers and tassels in such a swirl that it was hard to pick out the outlines if the light wasn’t on her perfectly.

There were jocks and squares, literary nerds, preppy snobs and party boys, just in this one cohort. Mindy had learned that the Keepers of the Long Now had intentionally recruited a wide variety of backgrounds within the English-speaking world, seeking diversity at every turn. The hope had been that finding new ways to live in the Long Now would be easier if there wasn’t a dominant mode and culture already established.

At this first meeting, though, nobody was discussing institutions or meaning or anything but how much fun it all was, this god-like control, how much they loved it, and how much everybody else on earth would love it the moment they got here.

They were, in other words, fools.

*****

The second month, Mindy spent time with Bex, who now lived in a castle on a spooky hilltop, that inside looked like a posh hotel done in all black. She also visited others in their versions of the Long Now, curious to see all their choices and houses and share her experiences.

A strange thing already began to happen to her, though: She began to lose track of time. She meant to visit Bex the first week, but after the Summons, the days slipped by with her animals and her tea and her books. She kept thinking that she had promised to visit Bex, but it just didn’t seem urgent. There would be plenty of time, and indeed, when she eventually did go, there was time, and Bex was not at all upset that she had delayed. In fact, she didn’t seem even to notice.

The second Summons, everyone was still enthusiastic, though not quite as wowed by the novelty of it anymore. Many people had changed their aesthetic already, and several had changed it four and five times. That third month Mindy went to see their new abodes, but when the third Summons came and more people had changed, she was no longer interested.

She went to the first of the quarterly Meetings with her larger cohort of 100, then after three of those went to her first annual Convocation of all 1000 of her classmates. It was so strange to know that only three days and a few hours had passed on the outside, when inside they had all had a year of perfection, and they all spent most of their time together remarking on that strangeness.

She had felt deeply connected to them when they all first entered the Long Now, but at the Convocation she felt aloof. She did not need them in the way she had believed she would. She enjoyed Bex, but even that friendship was trivial. Everything would be all right, no matter what happened, and it removed all stakes.

She finished all the books on her shelf, all the ones in the list she’d carefully assembled before insertion. Those books were replaced by new books, freshly written or chosen for her by a computer program that fed her own choices into an algorithm. She knew for a fact that if she tried the books the computer had chosen for her, she would love them, and yet she didn’t read one in that first year, or for a long time after. It did not feel right somehow.

At the next Summons, she began to notice the same strain on the faces of her cohort that she felt within her own soul. They all looked like they had napped for too long and were having trouble waking up.

At the next Meeting, Mindy found herself standing to speak, and giving voice to her feelings in a way she could never have done in life. She remembered her parents’ momentary fury, and her brother’s lasting resentment, but they seem like they happened to someone else. The Mindy of the Long Now was dulled somehow, not yet by the expanse of time but by the sheer magnitude of what the computers that ran the Long Now could provide.

The moment she spoke her truth, she saw the wave of it breaking on every face around the large table in the fake conference room inside a computer server. They all felt it too. Things were too perfect, too designed. It was too unmistakably artificial and engineered, and it was going to drive them slowly insane. 

So they hatched a plan. They would switch dwellings, for two weeks each month, with another person from their cohort, and prevent themselves from changing anything about their temporary home, instead consigning themselves to live just as the designer of the environment had chosen to live.

And so in that year that followed, Mindy lived in Bex’s castle, and in Thomas’ eclectic writing studio, and Chiv’s Sports Arena, and Athena’s teepee on a windswept plain. And each time, she discovered things about their paradises that annoyed her yet she was unable to change, things that endeared her to her own country cottage, and made her long to return there.

The returnings were wonderful, and her senses stayed sharp, and things had a rhythm, and time seemed as if it was real and mattered once more. It seemed as if they’d solved the problem of paralyzing heavenliness in the Long Now.

Of course, as a little voice kept whispering into the back of Mindy’s head, it was only year three.

*****

Of course, this new equilibrium lasted a long time, as all things lasted a long time in the Long Now. Over the next ninety-seven years, Mindy experienced life in hundreds of different fantasies, from people in her class that she knew well and those she’d only seen across meetings rooms and through group video calls. She ate their food and they ate hers, she slept in their beds and marveled at how firm some preferred their mattresses. And every time she returned to her country cottage she felt rejuvenated and grateful for it once more.

As the years passed, fellow members of her class began to design specific scenarios for people to spend time in, hoping they could rejuvenate more effectively or in a shorter time. She spent five days in an isolation cell at a maximum security prison, and two weeks adrift at sea. These were certainly equilibrium-calming from a mental standpoint, but she was not eager to repeat them. Some people loved them, though, and would design ever-more-dangerous and torturous scenarios for the like-minded, in some cases foregoing all but the occasional return to their original paradise.

The ones that interested her were the middle paths. Just enough pain to jolt her from her heavenly stupor, not so much she was afraid. She waited in dentists’ offices knowing a painful procedure was in the offing, she watched bad movies and wrote lengthy essays on them, and she slept on the ground but with good pillows and blankets for two uncomfortable-but-not-miserable weeks, then retreated to her cottage and didn’t leave her perfect bed for two days and loved every second of it.

A few members of her class never found something that worked for them, and had to leave. Most found their way, though, through that first hundred lived years, as Outside the earth passed a single circuit around its star. They settled into routines and broke those routines and found new ones. Very few fell in love with each other, and they started to remark on the oddness of that, since they were all the same age, and prime mating age at that.

Then, just after their 100th Convocation, the second class of 1000 25-year-olds arrived.

*****

It is a quirk of human nature that we measure our social status first by assessing our *absolute* standard of living. If we have plenty, we assume we must be high in status. If we lack, we assume we must be low in status. Overt markers of relative status can overcome this programming to a degree, but it remains difficult for a person whose material needs are met to accept humiliation.

In the Long Now, every single person’s most fantastic desires were met, at all times. When the only occupants of the Long Now were that first class, the unifying force of their shared mission and their reliance on each other for equilibrium-restoring paradise-exchange had kept them from each other’s throats. There had been bickering, but it had been ignorable.

Then the second class arrived, and suddenly there were two tribes. They had known and competed with each other a decade already, and for the second class, the rivalries and competition were only a year old. The first class remembered it from a century ago, but the participants in the Long Now had been augmented with neural memory implants, so even at that distance the memories were fresh.

In that second class, there was a genius of design. He built upon the work of the first class’ designers and quickly developed a set of scenarios that were so precise and perfect at fighting off paradise-induced disequilibrium, that all other scenarios became obsolete, and everyone started using this one guy’s scenarios. Nobody could outdo him, and for a time everyone was happy with his innovations.

But then, the genius invented an even better set of equilibrium scenarios, in which as little as a few hours could enable several more weeks of time in one’s self-designed paradise without listlessness and ennui. This time, however, in exchange for access to his scenarios, the genius demanded that others give first priority use of their own scenarios to him and his cohort.

It was not clear what the genius planned to do with this priority usage. Since any scenario could be duplicated endlessly, there was no need for any priority. But he demanded it anyway. He wanted to use others’ scenarios and know that he was the only one using it at that moment. He said that made it feel more special. When others in the Long Now said that was unfair and couldn’t be allowed, the genius said that in that case he wouldn’t share any of his scenarios anymore, since he didn’t get anything for them, and if they were stolen from him, he would stop making them.

People, in spite of or perhaps because of the fact that their needs were being so entirely met even without access to the genius’ scenarios, quite simply went insane when he threatened this.

They could not abide their status being threatened, and yet they could not get away. 

*****

The status games exploded in the Long Now. There was nothing else to do, and there was no way to resolve them. No violence was permitted, no enforceable punishments imaginable. For a hundred and then two hundred and then five hundred years, people sat in paradises and stewed, plotted possible vengeance and vanquishing.

Invention of scenarios became more than a pastime, it became an obsession. That was the only thing people could really offer each other, and thus their only locus of social control. The equilibrium scenario had essentially been perfected by the original genius, as mere hours in one of his scenarios now could offer weeks of equilibrium, and there wasn’t much hope of improving it.

But, other geniuses in succeeding classes invented new categories of scenario, and presented them at Meetings and Convocations attended by swelling masses of inhabitants, many whom Mindy had never met. She began to see the point of all the variety and randomness in the selection process—the Long Now needed designers, but it also needed people of less ambition, like Mindy, to experience those scenarios and assign status rather than compete for it. A cohort of only geniuses would tear itself apart.

The new generations of designers made pleasure scenarios beyond the scope of previous human gratification. Direct stimulation of the nervous system combined with hypnotic induction  made a mockery of her mere paradise. They made historical scenarios for those interested in history, and sporting scenarios where you were fantastically but also believably good at your favorite game. They made challenge and puzzle scenarios, they invented new board and card games by the hundreds. The entire society dedicated itself to entertaining each other, and while they all agreed on the surface that it was friendly, in fact, it was status all the way down.

The Long Now began to grow more silent, more isolated. The average number of per capita visits between members dropped, slowly but steadily. The scenarios grew so good that the real people simply could not compete for attention anymore. 

They began to realize that this was also what lay behind the lack of long-term romantic relationships. There were no hardships to need support through, no life milestones to celebrate, no deaths to mourn. Nothing at all that made a partner seem worthwhile and indispensable. And without that advantage, no partner could compete with the scenarios.

This was especially true after one of the design geniuses worked with the computers to create close-to-perfect facsimiles of other human beings. Suddenly everyone had a partner, or even five, physically perfect companions who were exactly submissive or dominant enough, never got bored or annoyed at hearing the same story over and over, and did whatever they were told, including telling their owner what to do if that was what was desired.

And yet these companions were not perfect. Not quite. Physically they were, but behind their eyes, the uncanny valley peeked out occasionally, reminding their owners that they were not real, not human, not really.

Mindy had companions and playthings over the years. She participated in every trend, right on schedule, and abandoned it when the next came along. She even competed for status in her way, choosing ever-more outlandish outfits to go to Summons and Meetings in, counting down to the next Convocation and what she was going to wear and who that was going to impress.

But she just got more and more miserable, as did everyone else. It was all empty, and they knew it. Five hundred years passed, then eight hundred, and even members of the same cohort barely spoke, just passed each other and showed off their latest accoutrements and tried not to stare too long at others’ accoutrements and thus offer them a status boost.

In the 879th year, the designers of the Long Now called a society-wide meeting, an extra Convocation, and instructed all the members to show up in plain outfits without Companions. At that meeting, which lasted the better part of a year, thousands spoke, and offered plans, and then they voted to create a Status Bank, which would track everyone’s status in numerical terms and provide overt structure to the social life of the Long Now.

It worked. Just the idea of it chilled everyone out, and when it finally came into being, the Status Bank was an enormous success. Even those who ended up on the bottom of its hierarchy were happy, because being low-status didn’t cost them anything. They could always try to rise later, but once you knew where you were, there was no particular reason to. Low-status people didn’t get less of anything. It was only the unknowing, that endless dance and race, that tortured them.

*****

After a thousand years, Mindy looked in a mirror one day and realized that she had definitively aged. They had been warned this would happen. The Long Now extended life, but it was not immortality. And the mind needed an accurate picture of itself. If they tried to fool the brain, experiments had shown, it would keep trying to wake itself up and cause great distress to the owner of the mind.

Thus, as a thousand years had flown in the Long Now, ten years had passed Outside, Mindy was 35, and she looked it. There were more lines on her face. She hadn’t been the prettiest girl in the world to begin with, but now her brows were getting heavier, and her neck was starting to sag just the tiniest amount. It changed nothing about her life, but still, time was passing.

Then Bex died. It happened suddenly on the Outside, in a matter of a month. The keepers of their bodies had incredible medical capacity, but they were not omnipotent. Bex had a rare blood disease that was genetic and gene therapies could not help. In the Long Now, however, her dying month translated to over eight years inside, of sickening and dying at a snail’s pace, endless weeks and months of reduced capacities and dread.

Mindy did her best to comfort Bex during this time. She found she no longer needed equilibrium scenarios to keep her from drifting into heavenly stupor, just the pain of watching Bex die was plenty.

Her friend certainly had the option of leaving the Long Now and shortening her pain. At any time, she could have awakened and it all would have been over in a matter of days, while Mindy’s hospice vigil would have ended immediately. She never brought herself to say so to Bex, but as the months turned into years, she felt real resentment.

Then Bex died, and ten more years went by like a day, and Mindy’s resentment turned to grief and then into remembrance and then into nothing. Her mind was a box where everything that had ever happened to her was stored, but as the box got fuller and fuller, it seemed emptier, because there was no good way to pick out any specific thing.

*****

During her second and third millennia, Mindy found herself turning inward, looking to build value inside herself. She was a woman now, in that infinite abyss of middle age, average adulthood with no beginning or end. She did everything. She learned instruments and languages, she held orgies and silent meditation retreats, she tried new scenarios and drug scenarios, she realized that even infinite variety eventually becomes repetitive, because of the sameness of the self, the doer.

Mindy also often went among the younger classes, those hot-headed twenty-five-and-six-and-seven year olds in their first centuries of life. The designers had realized that they needed to let these young things discover the limits of the Long Now, play their status games, and transcend them with their own institutions. Adding them to the existing Status Bank only destabilized it.

Mindy was high-status now, she realized. She had forgotten about the Status Bank for a long time, which turned out to be an extremely high-status move. Most of the people in her class had, it seemed. Their Meetings and Convocations now were rather drab affairs, most people wearing simple outfits, very few bringing computer-generated playthings with impossible muscles and breasts. Whatever status games they might play had been played before, in every incarnation, and they all knew it. 

Instead, Mindy’s class began to search for genuine sources of meaning. They created a Tibetan Mandala, ten miles wide and entirely made out of colored sand, and decreed that every grain of it must be laid by hand, by an actual member of their class. Two hundred years later it was done, and they chose by lottery someone to summon a gust of computer-generated wind to blow it away, then all stood around grinning like children, feeling the joy of something that was not built to last.

This became the new status game, the new obsession—doing things without the help of the computers. They built a castle from harvested stone and timber, and threw parties there, with food grown and cooked by hand. Hundreds of them lived there, together, and signed a pledge to get along and not leave for a century no matter what. They dammed a river and make a lake next to the castle, and filled it with fish, and created their own paradise rather than merely naming and describing it.

Mindy lived in the castle for a few centuries, but always returned to her cottage. The shelf of books the computer had recommended for her after she finished her list waited there still, untouched for five thousand years. It had become a talisman to her, a symbol of herself, of the independence of her own mind. She did not completely understand the psychological significance of the metaphor, but she knew she would not read them, no matter what.

*****

Mindy, along with much of her cohort, spent her five thousand and first year almost entirely crying. Half her life was gone, even if she lived to her fullness, which was expected to be about 125 years Outside. She was still past her prettiest, and her smartest, and her fastest and strongest. The keepers and their machines were doing an excellent job of preserving her body, so she did not feel like a decrepit seventy-five year old woman, but she did feel aged.

Her life began to speed up then. It already had been, she realized, but now was when she acknowledged it. Five thousand lived years makes each year seem mechanically shorter, as the percentage it represents drops. At first this feels like nothing, and then somehow it feels like the strongest force in the universe. Mindy felt that now.

She got depressed for five hundred years, and when she came out of it, she mourned the loss of that time and she had never mourned the loss of time in her life. She resolved herself to waste no more time, and set about to getting outside her own head, seeing what good she could do.

She remained unextraordinary, except in her experience and the wisdom it had engendered. So she decided to use that wisdom. She got involved with the younger classes and became a mentor, a psychologist of sorts. In time this made her a legend, and when she thought to check the status bank, she was near the top of it somehow. The genius who had made all of those early scenarios had fallen to near the bottom, as he’d gotten depressed by his own inability to match those early accomplishments and never really pulled out of it.

Others began to die more frequently as they aged. The keepers were doing all they could, but bodies decay, and that is that. Someone had an aneurysm, and the five minutes it took them to die Outside amounted to only eight hours in the Long Now, and most of that, the victim was unable to speak. It seemed impossible to all of them that anything could happen that quickly, and it terrified them all for years, some so much that they withdrew and did not speak to others much after that.

Another thousand years, and another thousand, and they grew old but no one spoke of it. They were the elders now, wise as Job to the classes below them, as high in status as any being had ever been, yet still, in their hearts, scared and uncertain and confronted with the fact that the uncertainty of death and dying would last for millennia, instead of months or years.

There were those who tried to run from that, back to the folly of their youths. They drove fast cars, and had orgies with improbably-bodied computer-gigolos, and yet it all seemed pathetic, in a way that the young people’s fascination with the same things did not seem pathetic. The latest classes, standing on the shoulders of giants, had invented scenarios that boggled the mind, strange vibrations and abstraction and fractals and paradoxical landscapes that divided the self. Yet the elders dared not participate, even when invited, and even though they could not articulate why.

Mindy herself stayed more connected to the younger cohorts than most. Helping those below her became her life’s work, the place she found meaning. All the computer-generated scenarios in the Long Now could not mimic the genuine exchange she found in real fear relieved, real anxiety soothed, and real shame alleviated.

*****

Mindy entered her tenth millennia, and they told her that she was dying. Not imminently, not in hours or days or even months, but she was. At 100, her kidneys had failed, and the implants they gave her lasted two decades, but had also eventually failed, and now her dialysis was failing, and when it failed she would really, finally, disappear. She had always known it would happen, and it also shocked her. 

“Welcome to the Long Now. I am Mindy Toole. I have lived nine thousand, three hundred, forty four years inside this place, and before I reach ten thousand, I will be dead. This bothers me, and it also does not. That is what I wish to impress upon you—that this world is a paradox.”

She spent time moving between the classes, attending their Meetings and Convocations, being celebrated as the pioneer she had been promised she was. They told her about things that had happened Outside since she entered the Long Now, and she laughed at how trivial it all seemed, how remote, and they laughed with her, though she never knew if it was genuine or because of her status.

“You will experience the heights of pleasure here, and the depths of despair. You will eat the finest foods, and you will deny yourself those same things. Every imaginable thing, you will both need and forbid yourself. Every sin, you will commit and you will abhor. You will see every sunset, and also die believing that the most beautiful one of all has escaped you.”

They had offered her the chance to leave. It would hasten her death to a matter of a few years, but she would be healthy enough to see the world. She could see her brother, who was an old man now but still alive, and meet his children and grandchildren. Her heart had raced and she had given a quick yes, but as she sat with the decision, she realized that she would not go. Could not go.

“I have lived all my millennia in an English Country Cottage, the kind that a twenty-five-year-old me thought was paradise. I often wonder, if I were starting over, knowing what I know now, what paradise would I make for myself? I have to answer that I would make it the same, except I would have made the bookshelf bigger. The volumes I picked out didn’t last quite long enough.”

She went back to her cottage, and stood before her shelf of books, the ones the computer had picked out for her based on her own first choices. These spines had sat undisturbed, untouched by dust or bugs or time, for century after century, waiting for her. They were, in some way, the most constant thing in her life. They were also a symbol, of her aloofness from this life, her refusal to submit to it completely, of her status as a being *in* this world but not *of* this world.

“I am often asked for advice on building a world. I never thought of myself as extraordinary, but now everyone else seems to. So I guess that would be my advice. Do not think of yourself as a separate thing, better than other things. What your capacities are, display them rather than speaking of them. Discover them instead of inventing them. Live them rather than dream them. You are here now, and not just Now, but the Long Now. You will have time, but it will not be infinite, and any life that is not truly infinite has the same problems as any other. So get going.”

And now, with Mindy’s decision to stay in the Long Now, that aloofness was gone. The books were just books. The dying woman was very much of this world. And so she chose a computer-selected book at random from the ornate shelf, sat down on her perfectly comfortable couch, opened to page one, and, thinking at last of nothing else at all, began to read.

END