Freefall - An Elias Thorne Story
Community Event - The Thousand Faces of Elias Thorne
Last week, Ian Patterson put out the call for a very weird kind of story. The rules were simple. You could write pretty much anything you wanted, as long as every single character in the story was named Elias Thorne.
So I muddled a bit on the underlying premise of AI hallucinations (and the commodification of what it means to be human), and this is what I came up with.
If you hate it, blame Ian.
Freefall
by J. Kyle Turner
It was a great hulking bumblebee of a ship, with cargo bay doors like a pair of football fields and a matte hull that reminded the observer of an event horizon, of the fathomless black depths of space.
It had no engines, no propulsion system of any kind. What it had was a dense block of attometer-thin wire that mapped the grid points where other universes intersected with this one. The ship moved by recalculating its position in localized space every microsecond (mostly for the convenience of human passengers, who couldn’t register jumps at such intervals).
In short, the ship decided where it wanted to be, went there, was there.
Presently, Captain Elias Thorne had decided to park it four kilometers above the surface of a dead planet whose only notable features were its steady orbit and its relative proximity to more important systems. As the planet’s atmosphere bulged inward to accommodate the ship’s ponderous weight, Captain Thorne leaned over the armrest of his chair and pulled a smooth, gray lever he’d had installed for just this purpose.
It gave a throaty, satisfying chunk, like the gear shift of a dying tractor. Six hundred feet below Thorne’s chair, twenty thousand Elias Thornes fell rapidly to their deaths.
The science behind this act of self-genocide went as follows:
To terraform a planet, you needed an atmosphere.
To make an atmosphere, you needed a few trillion tons of rotting biomass. Ideally, this would contain (or produce) useful base materials like oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and an assortment of minerals.
The human body provided these in more or less the correct dosages, and a single human cell contained the blueprint for a fully grown human.
Lab-grown humans were the sole property of their biological progenitor, and did not meet the legal definition of human beings as pertains to murder.
There was also, Captain Thorne reckoned, a considerable amount of superstition behind the idea. Human beings didn’t trust a home without the requisite number of ghosts, and no self-respecting human would deign to set foot on a patch of dirt where millions of his forebears had not died miserably. This had been true on Earth, and would go on being true until God (or something bigger) figured out a better plan for the universe.
In addition to his generous pay, the foundation that bankrolled Captain Thorne’s project assuaged his conscience through daily therapy sessions. The ship performed these itself by means of a digital avatar, which Captain Thorne had taken to calling Elias Thorne.
When it objected, Thorne reminded it that every single creature that had ever lived or died within a hundred thousand miles of this planet had been named Elias Thorne, and if the computer wanted to fit in, it had better get with the program.
This amused the real Elias Thorne immensely. He loved the joke so much that it became a part of his daily routine. When he walked through the rows of incubation vats, he glued nametags to the surface of each chamber and wrote Elias Thorne on every single one of them. When that got boring, he interviewed them for fake news shows. “We now go live to Elias Thorne for the latest news on Elias Thorne!”
In political news, Elias Thorne narrowly defeated Elias Thorne in a closely watched mayoral election. The local football team (the Elias Thornes) went on an unprecedented winning streak, becoming the undisputed champions of nearly every sport. His rotating cast of weather correspondents (all named Elias Thorne) predicted heavy rainfall every day of the week, and every single day they were right.
Immediately after this, Captain Thorne sat in his chair and pulled the lever that sent twenty thousand of his clones to their deaths.
They gained consciousness around the time they reached terminal velocity, when the thick press of air forced their mouths and eyelids open. They had no context by which to understand the spinning earth beneath them, or the wind that shattered their eardrums and twisted their arms and legs to breaking.
Their time in the vats had not taught them how to scream.
About three months into his contract, Captain Thorne sat down and did the math.
The average Elias Thorne weighed two hundred pounds. There were four drops per day, and twenty thousand Eliases per drop, which meant about eight thousand tons of Elias Thorne added to the nascent fossil layer with each day-night cycle. In order to hit the magic number of three trillion tons, he would need to maintain his current output for a little over a million years.
Thorne turned the napkin over and kept scribbling.
Even if the foundation renewed his contract every five years, the renewal limit capped out at fifty years. He’d assumed that he was making good progress, but if they wanted three trillion tons of biomass in the next fifty years, they were going to need a lot more Captain Thornes.
He squeezed a few more calculations into the margins, then stared at what he’d written.
Assuming his math was right, if you wanted to terraform a planet within fifty years, you would need about twenty thousand Captain Elias Thornes.
He balled up the napkin and tossed it into the nearest incinerator chute.
“How do I know I’m the real Elias Thorne?”
The digital avatar didn’t blink in surprise, because it wasn’t human and therefore couldn’t be surprised. But it did pause slightly longer than usual before answering.
“You are the real Elias Thorne.”
“But how do I know for sure? You’re an Elias Thorne too, you know.”
“You gave me this name,” the avatar reminded him.
“And someone gave me mine,” said Elias Thorne.
The avatar did a bit more thinking. “The way you know that you’re the real Elias Thorne,” it answered finally, “is that you’re the one pulling the lever.”
Captain Thorne chewed on that for a minute. In a legal sense, pulling the lever constituted a moral decision that could only be undertaken by a human intelligence. If so, then he met the legal definition of a human being, and couldn’t legally considered to be someone else’s clone.
Legally.
But he mostly liked this explanation because the lever went chunk when he pulled it, and because the other Elias Thornes did all their dying on the other side of a thick window.
“Okay,” Elias said, breathing a bit easier. “Okay, that makes sense.”
A few thousand miles away, the real Elias Thorne sat back in his chair and sighed with relief.
