refugees from paradise [2]

We were leaving the ship at hierarchy matinique, we had travellllled from Abidzr and after thirty days the ship began preparing to land the refugees using the insystem shuttles. How long will it take we asked the ship? You are still in slow time, it will take a few days to synchronize your time with the system. Slow time? All passengers travel in slow time, 1/40th of ship time… Only the night crew travel at ship time. The crew? Is the cat crew? yes, the cat, the trees in the arboretum, not all the humans are night crew, some are day crew or passengers. Is there a hierarchy there? No, the day crew runs things insystem, the night crew in the great dark between systems. Space between the Pliedes and Matinique in the Potelmy Cluster, where the last of the remnants of our species lived had been uneven. Dusty, clouds of matter expelled from a supernova, hulks of refugee carriers, being cannibalized on the moons surface. I was looking at the planet through one of the ports and could see strange black shapes floating around the ship. What are those? Small drone warships, angels. Are they human? yes they are, they are the ships children, they are there to dissuade anyone from attacking us… Do people attack you ? Sometimes. Is it dangerous? They all die. An echo of laughter in the distance. You have asked a lot of questions — you should become human. Come with me I want to show you something.. The avatar walked with us along a two mile long corridor. doors opening for us that were previously closed, opening as the avatar approached. This is the night captain’s territory, we are synchronising your time with the night crew, passengers rarely get to enter this part of the ship. Occasionally as we walked we could see humans walking, crawling or flying across the corridor. In some rooms people were as still as statues, in others they fluttered like birds. We passed above an enormous space full of plants. The avatar took us to a door at the end of the corridor, that opened as it approached it. The room was enormous, a cube a mile or so across, we followed the avatar for for ten minutes or so. In the far corner there was a solitary human dancing by itself. what is it doing? we asked. Dancing. Who is that? The night captain, dancing with Astrid…let me adjust your senses. so you can see. The human was dancing with another human, musicians were playing instruments. There was a bar along one wall against which other humans stood drinking. How did I know they were human? Because I had been adjusted. Other figures appeared on the dancefloor. What? The night crew is preparing. Are they human? This is the virtual night crew, apart from the night captain. In some ways none of us are human, in others we all are, we are what replaced them. Humans have been extinct for a very long time. What are you then? We are what replaced them. Why do you. all yourself that then ? Signs are arbitrary, social constructs, words, signs are traces of the ideological struggles that have been conducted by them and for them, evolution was on our side (laughter) so we took the name from them. I could hear the dancer asking Astrid, when do I take over? It’s being prepared, whenever you want to in other words. I have enjoyed dancing. Why didn’t you go ashore? Didn’t want to this time, Perhaps in Sagitarius, anyway call back the crew, retrieve the people, announce our departure, no more visitors. Expel everything. When everyone is aboard, we leave low.matinique. The humans, or at least the ship whose AI systems insists they are human, even whilst we think of them as quantum computers, when they talk to us tell us that they don’t understand our reactionary specism, our reactionary planetism, or the way we preferred our reactionary decrepitude to being alive…. It is difficult to argue with a 50 mile long dark matter spaceship, which today at least has a 100 metre long section resting on the surface of the planet. As we mystified refugees left the ship at heirachy.matinique, a few individuals, including my wife and my neuter who became ill on the passage, stayed and became humans… That’s all we know of the about them, there were 100 billion of them, then a few million, then a few hundred, then none, soon to be extinct, she had said to the night captain as they danced.