I could move my head easily in any direction, but I was no longer looking out into my cell. The place I was in was recognizable as a VE holding pattern, but there were no menus written in blood-red upon its walls, waiting to be pointed at by my index finger. All my oral requests had to be fed through an invisible listener hooked into Excelsiors nervous system.
First I asked for a live feed from an orbiting satellite, so I could look down on my homeworld from above.
There was a time delay of several minutes while the signal made its way across the hundred-and-eighty-six-million-mile gap, taking a dogleg route to avoid the sun, but it was still live, relatively speaking.
There was a lot of cloud, but not so much that I couldnt see that the colors were all wrong. There was way too much green, in all the wrong places, and too much black everywhere else. The outlines were wrong too.
I asked to look at an inset map, but the request wasnt specific enough; I got one with a crazy projection.
It took me a few minutes to figure out that the center of the flower-shaped design at which I was staring was the south pole. The equator was the ring drawn around the mid points of the petals.
I still couldnt connect the landmasses to their originals. I was out of my depth, floundering in uncertainty.
I had expected that the outlines of the continents might have changed slightly, but not to anything like the extent that they had. New islands had been raised from the seabed even in my day, but Id expected to be able to see the fundamental shapes of Australia, Africa, and the Americas, the open expanses of the Pacific and the South Atlantic and the vast clotted mass of Eurasia.
They were all gone; coastlines had obviously become negotiable, and continental shelves prime development sites.
I figured out, eventually, that the differences were mainly a matter of three new continents having been constructed and some of the older ones split by artificial straits, but so many coastlines had been amended sometimes drastically that the shapes I knew had simply been obliterated.
When I asked for a new inset of a 3-D globe pivoted at the poles it became a little easier to see what had been what, and to reassure myself that the Continental Engineers hadnt actually won control of continental drift, but it was an alien world just the same.
I asked to be connected to a series of ground-level feeds.
Given that a mere ninety-nine years had elapsed since the planet had been shrouded in volcanic ash I expected to find the remains of North America in a bad way. Even if the atmosphere had cleared within a decade, I reasoned, ecosystemic recovery must be at a very early stage. I expected an underpopulated wilderness still struggling to establish itself, but that wasnt what I found.
I found a riot of exotic gardens, and a hundred brand-new cities, all competing to outdo one another in the craziness of their architecture. There were towers sculpted out of all manner of gemlike stones; sprawling multichambered branching growths like thousand-year-old trees; walls of metal and roofs of glass; piazzas lined with all kinds of synthetic hide; roadways of smart fabric; and much more.
It was an unholy mess, but it certainly wasnt a wilderness and it was anything but underpopulated.
The Los Angeles in which I had grown up had been in recovery from its own ecocatastrophe, and Id always thought of it as a living monument to the efficiency and capability of gantzing nanotech. Maybe it had been, by the standards of its own century, but history had moved on and technology had undergone a thousand years of further progress.
As I settled my virtual self into an artificial eye gazing out upon the streets of the city nearest to the now-drowned coordinates that LA had once
occupied I saw that it wasnt just VE tech that had undergone more than one phase-shift. I had to suppose that the buildings I was staring at had been raised by a process analogous to gantzing, but they certainly hadnt been aggregated out of commonplace materials or embellished with the synthetic cellulose, lignin, and chitin derivatives that had surrounded me in my former incarnation. Here, once-precious stones and once-precious metals seemed to be everyday building materials, and they were augmented by all manner of fancy organics.
When I asked, a whispering voice told me that there were more than a hundred different kinds of incorruptible organic construction materials on display, as well as inorganic crystallines.
My informant wasnt a human voice it was a machine whose responses were filtered through a sim of some sort but that didnt mean that the member of the sisterhood commissioned to monitor me had packed up her kit and gone home. My questions were still being mediated by actual listeners, even though I was getting the answers direct from the data bank.
They were experimenting with dextrorotatory proteins in my day, I said. There was the stuff Damons father and foster mother invented as well: para-DNA, they called it. Damon told me that PicoCon had big plans for that, once he and Conrad had sold out to them. Are those the kinds of things Im looking at?