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When I finally woke up, the world had ended 1,500 years ago. But that was okay, because God built a new one.
###
I stood outside on the neatly manicured lawn of the waking center. Through the open archway leading inside the recovery room. I could see Mrs. Conner and her children being laid out on comfortable lounges by the medical morphs. The three humans were still, just coming out of nanostasis after their millenia and a half long sleep. Once the medical morphs were sure their charges were properly settled, the morphs retreated quickly, disappearing behind the curve of the small building, leaving me to wait with the company of Charlie.
"Are their temp quarters ready?" I asked Charlie. He was a standard issue investigative support morph, a robot covered in synthetic skin and short fur, shaped to resemble a particularly tired and mournful hound dog, and dressed in a perpetually rumpled business suit and overcoat.
"Yeah, Boss," Charlie replied. "All ready and waiting." Which he already knew that I already knew, because the Groupmind always had everything ready. But I'm human, so I asked, and Charlie answered, because that was his job. Well, one of them.
From inside the recovery room, Mrs. Conner was sitting up, looking around in alarm. Her boys, Artie and Brad, were doing much the same, looking for a man none of them wanted to see. She was white, with mousy brown hair, and lines on her face that made her look closer to fifty rather than thirty.
"Mrs. Conner? It's all right," I called over to her. She looked over in my direction. What her eyes saw was a woman with light brown skin, cornrow braids drawn back into a ponytail, wearing a neatly pressed shirt, slacks, and a tie, with an electronic tablet in her hand. What her brain saw was a woman with the markers of an authority figure, which brought her visible stress indicators down, just as I'd hoped. "I'm Keesha Thomas, your orientation guide," I continued. "You can come out."
"Where's Steve?" Mrs. Conner asked, walking out cautiously, holding the younger boy Brad's hand. She hadn't looked up yet, her attention focused on me and Charlie. "He's my husband," she told me. "Ex-husband, I mean."
"He's one thousand and seventy-three kilometers away, Mrs. Conner," I reassured her.
"And where are we?" Mrs. Conner demanded, looking down at Brad as he tugged urgently on her hand, pointing up towards the sky. She raised her head and let out a shocked, keening, "Oh, my God…"
That was the usual reaction to seeing the view through the Roof. God knows I'd had it when I was first woken up, after spending a millennia and a half in nanostasis.
Lost Earth hung overhead, nine times as big as the Moon, even though it was a hundred thousand kilometers away as the Ring orbited our homeworld's equator. White clouds were rolling over West Africa, and the seas were a dark, deep blue. To either side of the waking center the Ring rose into the sky, two curving arches soaring overhead to meet somewhere behind Earth, over three hundred and fourteen thousand kilometers away.
The numbers didn't mean a damned thing of course, anymore than my assurance to Mrs. Conner that her husband was over a thousand miles away, unable to touch her. She couldn't believe any of it, even as she half sat, half fell into the chair that Charlie placed behind her.
"Here's the deal," I said. "We're on the Ring. That's really Earth up there. You've been asleep for one thousand five hundred and three years. The Groupmind started waking up people two years ago, in stages, so the first people who woke could orientate the rest. This place is humanity's home now, and we can't go back to Earth." Yeah, that was a lot to dump on the poor woman just after she woke up. I'd found trying to do the initial orientation in dribs and drabs just led to dragging things out, instead of moving forward to the really important stuff.
Like the fact her ex-husband still wanted to kill her.
"I wanna go home!" Artie declared, while Brad still stared up at lost Earth with Mrs. Conner. "Mom, can we go home?"
"In a minute, sweetie," I said to him, sitting down beside Mrs. Conner. "I have to finish talking with your mom. Is it alright if I call you Janet, Mrs. Conner?"
"We can't…" Mrs. Conner started to say. She shook her head, trying to reorient her entire world. "Who's in charge?" she asked.
"Right now, me," I told her.
"No, no," she said insistently. "Who's in charge of this whole place?"
"The Groupmind," I said. "The same AI that put your family and the rest of humanity in nanostasis fifteen hundred years ago. This particular habitation zone is, technically, under the control of the United States government, but the President and Congress are still trying to figure what they can still do, since there's no more armed forces, tax collection, national borders, and so on."
"What about the police," Mrs. Conner asked, looking increasingly desperate.
"No more police either," I said. "I mean, there are, but they don't have much to do except bug people about noise complaints. The Groupmind takes care of pretty much everything."
"I need the police," she said. "I've got a restraining order on Steve, but if there are no more cops…"
I gave her my most reassuring smile, "I've got something better than a cop for you, Janet."
Right on cue, the three morphs that had been waiting behind the curve of the waking center walked into view. Two were about a meter tall, a raccoonmorph and a leopardmorph, sized to serve young Brad and Artie, and based off their favorite animals. The third was an adult sized shepardmorph, with the same fur pattern as Belle, who had been Janet Conner's pet dog and her boon companion when she'd been growing up. Because this poor woman needed someone she could trust in this strange new world, and if her morph prompted fond memories of her life before it went to shit, the Groupmind was more than happy to use that advantage.
"Good morning, ma'am," the shepardmorph said, bowing to her slightly. Janet's morph was dressed in a slightly punk style, in black jeans, a tank top, leather wrist bands, and a couple of gold earrings in her left ear. She wasn't any taller than Janet, but the morph projected a subtle air of toughness, standing straight, ears and eyes flicking every once and a while as she scanned the surroundings.
"This is how the deal works," I said to Janet. "Every single person on the Ring, from the day they're either Awakened or born, gets a morph. They're your servant, and your protector. It's their sole purpose in life to make sure you're happy and safe."
Janet looked her new morph up and down, and then rubbed her lips briefly. "Does Steve have one?"
"Yes," I said. "Which brings me to the other part of the deal." I reached into my pocket, drawing out the penknife and unfolding it. "When I say 'keep you safe…'" I took a firm grip on the handle, and swung my arm down to jab the knife into my thigh.
Almost faster than the eye could follow Charlie's paw snapped out, grabbing my wrist to stop me before the tip of the knife could even brush against my pants. When I dropped the knife, his other paw caught it in mid air, and only then did he let go of me.
"Sorry, Charlie," I murmured, before turning back to Janet. "The morphs are here to keep us safe, sometimes from ourselves, sometimes from each other. If your ex-husband Steve tries to get closer to you or your children than the court mandated one kilometer, his morph would stop him. If that court order ceased to exist tomorrow, and he tried to attack you, his morph would stop him. If he somehow disabled his morph, not only would your morph stop him, every single other morph in the vicinity would rush forward to make a wall between the two of you."
"But he can still go online and..." Janet started to say.
"No, he can't," I told her. "We've had a couple of years to work this out. He can't harass you or your children online. He can't call you. If he runs any kind of search for any of you, it's going to come up a complete blank. The Groupmind controls all data access. As far his world is concerned, you're all invisible to him." I took Janet's hand, and her morph rested a calming paw on the poor woman's shoulder. "He can't touch you anymore."
Janet's eyes grew wide, and her shoulders began to shake. Then with a racking cry she began to sob, as the tension that had followed her for literally over a thousand years fell away like a chain unlocked from her soul.
* * *
Charlie and I watched the Conners and their morph companions drive off in an automated electric cart, heading off to their newly assigned garden apartment in the small development about two kilometers away. I checked my watch, and then the Roof, as the latter began to dim, blocking the sun at the Ring began to transition to night. Among the other advantages humanity had gained from being stuck on the Ring, aside from everyone being comfortably fed, housed, granted access adequate health care, and freed from the terror of domestic abuse, the entire population operated on the same day/night cycle, which meant no more damned time zones.
"You're walking back, as usual?" Charlie asked.
"Yeah," I said. I was good at my job, and that had earned me a little leeway with Groupmind the Great and Powerful. So the Big G had gone along with my suggestion to save the Conners for last today, knowing the explanations might have gotten awkward. Still, even the "easy" awakenings could be difficult, and I needed time to degauss before I interacted with humans who weren't recovering from immediate emotional trauma.
(You'd think dealing with people coming out of abusive relationships would be one of my hardest jobs. Truth was those were some of the best, because the outcome, even taking into account the realization that we're all stuck in an orbiting prison, was usually positive. Now the ones where I had to explain that Grandma/Grandpa/your sick little sister/daughter, ect. hadn't been healthy enough to put into nanostasis and died over fifteen hundred years ago… Well, those just sucked.)
As we headed down the brick paved path back into town, I asked Charlie, "Could I have my knife back, please?"
"Yes, Boss," he replied. He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and handed the penknife back. "Wish you wouldn't do that," Charlie said, not for the first time. His expression went from its default mournful, to something even more hangdog.
"It's the best demonstration I could come up with to show how fast a morph can be," I told him, also not for the first time. It was a weirdly human thing for a morph to bring up a discussion that we both knew we'd, well, discussed before. I could never decide if Charlie just needed reassurance, or he hoped my squishy meat brain might forget we'd had this conversation before, and he'd finally convince me to quit pulling that stunt. "Besides," I went on, "I haven't hit my femoral artery yet."
"Your femoral artery is on the inside of your thigh, not the outside," he noted. "But my arm servos might jam up and I might not catch it next time."
"Like you don't have medical morphs within ten seconds reach in case I actually succeeded," I told him.
"Five seconds," Charlie corrected.
"And how many hours are your arm servos rated for?" I asked.
"Four hundred and twenty thousand to four hundred and thirty thousand hours, depending on their exact location," he replied dutifully.
"Of which you've used…?"
"Approximately eighteen thousand," Charlie admitted.
"Yeah, I'll take my chances, Charlie," I said. I gave him a little smile. "Besides, if you were really afraid I'd hurt myself, you wouldn't let me play with a knife in the first place."
"That's true, Boss."
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