The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Read Online Free PDF Page B

happened as I steamed east, away from Detroit and the ruins of my father’s city/museum. It was smooth sailing for the first couple hours, then I started to hear ominous clunks and thuds. I knew it must be the little daisy cutters. Some of them must have found soft spots in the bag’s armor. That was the point of a billion little daisy cutters instead of just one big one—a brute-force attack on the entire defensive perimeter of the target. An attacker only has to find one hole—a defender needs to be seamless.
    The zepp’s idiot lights got redder and redder as time went by, one critical system after another failing. By the time I thought to bring her down—I was in shock, I guess, plus I was young then—it was too late. Altitude controls were locked.
    I watched, helpless, clutching the pack’s canisters, as we drifted in the winds, sometimes going higher, sometimes dipping down. The Carousel was a destabilizing force: every time the wind gusted, it rocked like a pendulum, and as the zepp’s gyros wound down, we rocked with it.
    The zepp set itself down in North Carolina, amid the leftovers of the old UNC campus, settling gently. I slid/stumbled down the ramp with the pack in hand. The zepp was still losing altitude, inching lower and lower. Soon enough, the gondola would come down on the top of the Carousel, doing who-knew-what damage. I did a little executive planning and decided that I had a way better chance of bringing the Carousel up to nominal than I did the daisy-cutter wormed zepp, and I blew the cargo hoist loose, cutting the zepp free so that it lofted away, to ply its idiot way through the skies, unmanned and dying.
    - - -
    The thing about immortality is, it’s complicated. A mixed blessing. Dad’s immortality was a much simpler thing, really: a collection of hacks and tricks to wind back his body’s clock, to repair the damage of the ages, to make him young again. Like his yogurt, for his liver.
    With me, it was all about the germ plasm. I’d been modded down in my nuclei, a transhuman by birth, a native of the transhuman condition. And no one knew what that meant, really. Including me.
    So while it was apparent early on that I was aging slowly—retaining maximal brain plasticity by keeping my physical age as young as possible—no one seemed to suspect just how slowly I was going to age. I was chronologically thirteen when I landed in North Carolina, but I was physically more like ten. At the time, I assumed that meant that I’d just go on, aging slowly, but aging.
    Not so, as it turned out.
    Twenty years later, I was still eleven. Maybe thirteen. Let me put it this way: no pubes. This was not what I had in mind when I pictured immortality. I had . . . stirrings. But they were like phantom limbs—there but not there, elusive, an itch I couldn’t scratch.
    The cultists were mildly curious about this, in the same way that they were mildly curious about most things. They weren’t worked up about it or anything. They didn’t get worked up about anything. That was the point. But they liked having kids and they wanted to know when I’d be ready to help out in that department. So they asked, every now and again, frankly. And I told them the truth. Why not? They weren’t going to throw me out—not as long as they thought I was a wirehead.
    The only person who had a problem with my perpetual adolescence was me. There were moods that came on me, now and again, sudden and ferocious. Terrors, too. It came with the brain plasticity—I could adapt to anything, but nothing ever stuck. I could never approximate the incredible conviction of the cultists—not even the lesser conviction of the normals who traded with them every now and again. I’d believe something for a day or two—like wanting to overthrow the cult and rescue the wireheads from their surgical bondage—and then it would seem like a stupid idea, and then a distant memory. Only my journals showed me how changeable my weather was. When