Storming Heaven Read Online Free PDF

linked the human race together.  Tabitha knew that the illusion was an illusion and could never give herself completely to it, but she needed the comfortable to remind her that there was something worth fighting for, even if it was a dream long gone.
     
    Was she human?  It was something she had struggled with for centuries, ever since the Endeavour – a starship only called a starship by the grace of semantics – had reached a new star and encountered humanity’s first warp-capable starship.  The aging Tabitha had dreamed of a new world, but instead she’d been warned that no Earth-like world was safe for humans, and she could seek a kind of immortality as a ghost in the machine.  Her mind, her personality, perhaps even her soul, had been transcribed into the growing MassMind…but was she human?  Was she still Tabitha, who had captained a Bridge Ship and led humanity’s desperate struggle to survive, or was she nothing more than a tiny computer program that dreamed it was a woman?
     
    She wasn’t the only one to have those doubts, but as humanity grew older, it seemed to her that the number of humans who had those doubts fell.  She had been Roman Catholic on Earth, but humanity’s religions had been almost completely exterminated by the Killers.  By becoming part of the MassMind, she had wondered at the time, was she trying to cheat God?  Was she doomed for punishment on the Day of Judgement?  And yet, she thought from time to time, could anyone cheat God?  If He wanted to summon her, He could do it with ease, no matter where she hid.  He could certainly reach into the MassMind for her.
     
    Her eyes closed as she slumped into a chair that was not a chair.  It would have been easy to lose herself within the MassMind and thousands of human patterns did so every year.  She could hear the faint whispers of the collective MassMind at the back of her head – everyone in the MassMind would hear them – and she knew that one day she would succumb to the song herself.  She was the oldest personality within the MassMind, over a thousand years old, and she was tired.  The illusion of being tired was the only link she had to being human.  There were people – personalities – in the MassMind who never grew tired, or bored with their games.  They could do anything in the MassMind; it never failed to shock her, even after a thousand years, how far people could go.  The MassMind never judged, for no one was hurt, but she still struggled with her own morality.  Was it right to lose oneself in a rape fantasy, even if no one was actually hurt?  Was it right to take part in a paedophilic encounter if the child was nothing more than a computer-generated illusion?
     
    She remembered her own early days in the MassMind and shuddered.  She’d explored all of the possibilities.  She’d been a man for a few dozen years, learning what it felt like to be the opposite sex, before reconfiguring herself back into a woman.  She’d been a child again, and then an animal, and then creatures out of modern myth.  It hadn’t been real, yet it had felt real, and when she had finally pulled herself out of the endless illusionary luxury, she had realised the truth.  The MassMind existed to keep the human race distracted from the truth.  If the Killers stumbled across the MassMind and its remote nodes, they would wipe out billions of human personalities without a second thought.
     
    A magazine appeared on her coffee table and she picked it up thoughtfully.  It claimed to be a listing of various entertainments, but none of them drew her attention.  She was perhaps the only personality still active that would have recognised the origins of some of the entertainments, the programs and illusions that distracted humanity from the truth.  It still astonished her how much had been lost over the years, but the latest version of Star Wars , in which the heroes went up against the Galactic Empire, was still going strong.  She