Derwin Lester IIThe Forever Sleep (E-book)
It was "Peace on Earth," when the world to uploaded to the cloud. Scott Douglas stayed awake and monitored the statis tanks. Then the Internet went down. Without it regulating their brains, humanity would drown in days.
Credits and Copyright
First Edition
Copyright©2013 DGLIIPublications
Published as Cloudy with a Chance of Bandwidth
Second Edition
Copyright@2017 Divided By Zero
Published as The Last to Fade Away
Third Edition
Copyright@2018 Divided By Zero Books
Published as The Forever Sleep
Fourth Edition
First Edition
Copyright©2013 DGLIIPublications
Published as Cloudy with a Chance of Bandwidth
Second Edition
Copyright@2017 Divided By Zero
Published as The Last to Fade Away
Third Edition
Copyright@2018 Divided By Zero Books
Published as The Forever Sleep
Forth Edition
Copyright@2022 Divided By Zero Books
Published as The Forever Sleep
All Rights Reserved.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
Chapter One
Dear Reader,
I met someone yesterday…well, a woman, I mean. She looked just like my last wife, back when people were still getting married. It was during my daily rounds, humming along to a song I forgot with a clipboard in hand. I was walking down the rows of stasis tanks, which were fifteen-foot-tall tubes filled with suspension liquid, checking on the vitals of everyone. The lady in question was floating naked in hers, her face expressionless. Just a sense of waiting. As my heels click-clacked through the endless rows of floating naked people, my mind kept wondering, “What was she waiting for?”
I never understood why I still do it. I could never check everyone’s vitals on schedule. Not eyeballing it like the president wanted. But what else was I going to do? There wasn’t going to be any new “Simpsons” episodes on for the foreseeable future. Besides, my whole job was just to babysit a bunch people throughout eternity. It was the biggest selling point for his program, to have “human eyes to keep people safe” for the Great Download.
I don’t think they even have a concept of America in the WorldNet anymore, let alone a President. That’s all gone to them. All they have is the infinite conceptual design space of the Net. I think so, anyway. I’ve never been in there.
They gave me the option of downloading or staying in the real world as a “Network Custodian” or janitor, as we call ourselves. I thought about it; really, I did. In the end, I didn’t want to give up the real world. The videos from the Net test sites seemed so real but weren’t. It was all a lie, and I knew I could never make myself believe the lie enough to be happy there.
So, I chose the normal life, if this is what we used to call normal back in the day. I had hoped that a few million other people would want the normal life, too.
But no, it turned out that I was a dinosaur, and there were only a few hundred dinosaurs like me around the world, people who didn’t want the fake life but instead settled for the mundane of the real.
Jesus, I go on too much. I guess I’m getting old. Ha, I think yesterday I turned two hundred and forty. I should buy myself a cake.
Chapter Two
Dear Reader,
Feeling restless, I got away from Sector Two for a few hours today by taking the auto-train from Washington D.C to Niagara Falls.
It was a lot different than I remembered. I think the last time I was there I was fourteen years old and still in my first body. Sometimes I forgot the way everything's changed. It was colder, like the rest of the country these days. The main structure was still there: the old visitor’s center.
I walked through the visitor’s center; aside from rats and birds, there wasn't a whole lot of life left. There were pamphlets thrown about all over the floor. I picked one up. It was an ad for the closing of the center: “Only fourteen days left till the last barrel goes over."
The Falls themselves had receded a few hundred feet. I walked out to the rusty old railing that held back the dumber people from accidentally falling over the edge and into the water; I just stared for a while. I'd been told that they had a virtual version of the Falls in the Net. You could go over the end in a barrel as many times as you wanted. The water tasted like beer and candy, and potatoes, and anything else you wanted all at once.
But that was no place for a man. That's what my dad would have told me. That place sounds more like a four year old’s private fantasy than a life. As I looked around at my true, real life, I noticed it was quiet. Oh god, it was so quiet. A place like Niagara should have children running around and laughing, and Asian couples on their honeymoons taking pictures. It should be a place where people are alive, showing the best of themselves to the world. But there was no one.
God, I hate this job sometimes.
Scott G. Douglas
Sector Two, North America
June 19, 2234
Chapter Three
Dear Reader,
I got a visit from my head shrink today, Shelby. She followed me everywhere, even into the gym. She was a former human downloaded into a silver robot body. Those idiots liked to walk around in the real world and pretend they were still human. I hated that they outnumbered the real humans on the planet.
It used to bug the crap out of me that they would send us almost-people as emotional support instead of real people. Hell, you'd think we'd get a harem of big-breasted blonds to help us relax. No, all we get is a discount code for Pornhub.
But anyway, back to the shrink. She wanted me to start doing some sort of idiotic mental exercises, like a crossword puzzle combined with a Rubik’s cube in French. I barely understood what the damn thing was; I definitely didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it. I told her to just keep it and I’d read a book. She's been my shrink for years. Every time we have had our weekly meetings, she has recommended that I get downloaded into a robot body. Shelby once told me that Synthetic Persons enjoy the best of both worlds since they have a mobile body and can jack into the Net.
She has always brought up that crap. About how I could live through whole stories in the Net instead of just reading them, stories that were never published in print. Time and time again, I’ve told her I wasn't that big of a next generation fan, that I liked the original series better. She would look at me weird every time.
That's ok. Shelby's kind of a dumbass anyway. She's the one who suggested I do this stupid journal in the first place. Said it would be good to get my thoughts down for someone to read one day. She even suggested today that she read them, but I laughed and walked out of my gym and into the showers. Like anyone's ever going to read this.
Scott G. Douglas
Sector Two, North America
June 23, 2234
Chapter Four
Dear Reader,
I got an e-mail today. The Annual Network Custodian Convention is tomorrow in Vegas. Even though everyone pretty much hates each other, the chance to get drunk and tell old stories for the hundredth time has been something I look forward to. So, I spent the day packing.
I packed light, a habit from the Army I never shook. Only a toothbrush, a towel, and my trench coat that my mother made for me. All the Janitors are retired military, just like our fathers were. We were part of the last generation of soldiers, although none of us fought the final war.
No, we all just got our discharge papers and quietly faded away. Maybe if we had fought with everyone in Israel, things might have turned out different. I doubt it, though. America had the largest standing army at the end. There weren't fifty thousand of us when they shut everything down and converted to drones.
How did we let it get this way? I figured if I raised my kids the old way it might help. But I went wrong somewhere. They thought I was a dinosaur, because I wouldn't allow a Virtual Reality computer in the house. I had one basic computer in my study which I wouldn't let the kids on either. I only used it for work purposes. I made them go outside, but that didn't last very long. They always went to their stupid friends’ houses and got on their VR computers. And they were vegetarians, for god's sake! How did my children become vegetarians? Probably from their mother, Janet.
Janet was my second wife. She thought we needed be like everyone else. She wanted us to spend our whole lives in online communities, eat synthetic vegetarian meat, and join an atheist church. She wasn’t terribly bright. Well, I don’t want to get into it all now. I'll probably rant about number two more later.
My last wife...Maggie was a hell of a woman. She was beautiful, even though she always denied it. I never got tired of telling her that she was the most beautiful thing in my life. Not to mention she could cook. I met her in the army after my second wife had sent me her "Declaration of Freedom" notice. They resembled divorce papers, so I happily signed anyway.
But wife three, she at least made me laugh. I hadn't met too many women who could make me laugh. Maggie was brave, too. I remember how mad she was when the Army shut down Airborne School because she loved jumping out of planes. I thought she was crazy; I refused admission to Airborne School at Fort Benning no matter how many times she tried to get our commander to volunteer me. I never did well with heights.
I did make the Final Jump. It was the last one before they shut it all down. I swear to god I had never been happier than when I hit the ground. I remember her running up to me, and we both asked to marry each other at the same time. She always told it afterwards as she asked me first. I just smiled and nodded like it was true. I didn't care that it wasn't, because she was going to be my wife. That was all that mattered.
We were both in our late nineties and about halfway through our second bodies when talks of the Great Download began. I didn't believe it at first. Hell, I didn't think everyone on Earth could agree on something that wasn’t an elaborate suicide pact. But the President did it. He signed the United States of Earth World Charter, which was one of those groups we all had to join and nobody outside of Washington D.C. voted on it. Then the Great Download was signed in to effect, stating all persons have the right to "express their feelings and own creative outputs and live their lives to the fullest extent of their imaginations." His speech kinda went downhill from there, but it reminded me of a couple of really good Beatles songs I hadn’t heard in a while. The President was trying to expand everyone's mind, I guess.
They started with the sick, then the elderly, or at least those who had not cloned another body and were over seventy years of age. Then the children were installed into the stasis tanks. Most of them were so jacked in already that the tanks wouldn’t make much difference. They just wouldn’t have to wake up from the dream anymore.
Then it became a lottery, like it was some sort of fantastic prize. I remember seeing my neighbors hugging and laughing in the street when their number was called, like they were being taken to Heaven riding shotgun with Vegan Jesus in his winged Tesla.
One by one, they left until they were all gone. Every single last one of the headache inducing, vegetarian morons that I had to call neighbors were going off to the big hippie paradise in the sky. Then it was just Maggie and me. It took thirty years to empty out the world. The dumb part of it was that it took till 2131 for the religious opposition to finally get the guts to say no. By then, it was way too late.
I was rooting for the religious guys, but I wasn't about to go and fight. I figured, why should I? The download wasn't mandatory, land was cheap, and I wasn't big enough of a believer in Jesus in the first place. I was content to do my federal-wildlife job and watch the world get a lot less crowded.
Maggie was raised Catholic and wasn't too happy with the way things were going in the Middle East. Truth be told, neither was I. But when did anything ever go right in the Middle East? We talked it over; neither one of us thought that the religious side could win. Of course that didn't matter to our old friends from the army. Shipping boats filled with old soldiers sailed out to Israel to fight. Our old commander e-mailed us and said it was the last stand for the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Maggie brought it up more than once. But I...I just didn't want to leave. We had fought our wars. I'd seen enough people becoming tiny little pieces of people to last me the rest of my life. We were happy there with our orchard and practically the whole state of Kentucky to ourselves. Well, I guess Maggie wasn't so happy. One morning I woke up, and she was gone. She left me a note that said, "I love you, Turkey. Goodbye."
I never saw her again.
Scott G Douglas
Sector two, North America
June 25, 2234
Chapter Five
Dear Reader,
The big, mysterious briefing is supposed to start in a few minutes. There is an air of celebration through the entire place. I know I complain quite a bit but damn, it's good to see these guys. Plus, the two girls, Jane and Rebecca. The only two women left on the planet are in a lesbian relationship. Such a bummer.
We spent the first night of the conference like we always do, playing beer pong. After turning a hundred years old, most people get the silly idea that the stuff they did as kids is too immature. But passing two hundred with no end in sight, all I want to do is have a good time.
Now it’s a tradition to spend the first night pretending to be twenty years old again, talking about our favorite calendar girls throughout the ages, listening to turn of the millennium rock music.
Jonathan Shane supplied the beer and the whiskey, since it was his turn. We all have our own breweries for our sectors, even though we aren't supposed to. His is on this little island off the coast of Australia. John's a good guy, even if he married his shrink. It took us all by surprise a couple of decades ago when he and Brittany tied the knot, but we all showed up and gave our support. In one of John’s drunker moments, he told me about Brittany and her physical upgrades to make her compatible with John. I was sworn to secrecy afterwards, but I don’t think this journal counts as telling.
For a machine, Brittany sure can drink. I never thought a robot could drink me under the table, but boy howdy I was wrong. She can play cards, too. Bitch got my signed copy of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy last night.
But she made all of us breakfast this morning. All three hundred eighty-seven of us. She used the replicator machines in the kitchen, but she made the first batch. I guess that counts, right? Haha.
Well, the big scary conference is about to start, so I'll tell you, dear reader, if there ever is a dear reader, what happens.
Yours truly,
Scott G. Douglas
Sector Eight, North America
June 26, 2234
Chapter Six
Dear Reader,
Aliens. I just...I can't even believe it. Real aliens. That's what the briefing was about. I just...well, like all things confusing, it started with a girl.
Jane, one of our two resident lesbians, is the Supreme Janitor. She hears our complaints about each other and gives a briefing to the President once a month on the state of the real world. After we took our seats in the auditorium, she turned to Brittany and said, "Shut down the networks. All the cameras and anything not hooked up to my generators outside."
"Yes, ma'am." Brittany plugged herself into the Network running the room. The lights kicked off and then dimmer ones kicked back on. I don't even know where Jane found the gasoline.
"Gentlemen, and my lady," Jane began, smiling at Rebecca. "We have a situation. Our people at Moonbase Alpha found this image in their monitors when they were observing Pluto. Bear in mind, this is a real image. This has not beenPhotoshopped in any way."
The monitor behind Jane lit up and showed...well, I wasn't sure what they were. But it sure looked like flying saucers passing over Pluto.
"I know you're all thinking that this a whole bunch of crap. Yeah, I thought the guys on Alpha were fucking with me, too. But I took the shuttle up to the moon and looked at it all for myself. And yep, those are flying saucers, guys. This is first contact. And yes, all the nukes really were destroyed after the Feds hit the Jews. And no, John, you can’t try to build one, so that option isn't available."
The auditorium laughed. Jane always knew how to cut through tension. Probably why she was in charge.
"I tried contacting the President and couldn't reach him at his office. Then I tried his virtual cottage. Then I tried Madame Mary's Bath House and Happy Ending Store, and I couldn’t get a hold of them either."
After that the room got quiet. "Then I tried the White House and the World Congress, the Secretary of the Arts, the Secretary of Anti-Virus and the Library of Congress. I even tried to contact the Playboy Store. And all I got was 'Internet Explorer cannot display this page.'”
This caused the room of chain smokers to puff on their cigarettes even more. I knew we should have used Google Chrome for the download.
“So, either someone online has created the most fantastic virus ever made and has completely taken down the World Net, or...two plus two is four, and we have a problem. And we're all on our own to solve it. The question now is what do we do?" Jane asked the group. Like any of us had any idea. Of course, our first thought was to fight. Steve was the one to voice that idea.
"With what? Worst case scenario: they invade with the notion of a free banquet that we've conveniently gift wrapped for them a hundred years ago. And if we try to mount a defense, this is our grand army." She held up a piece of paper and read:
“Three hundred and eighty-seven personnel with automatic weapons, one Earth-to-Moon shuttle, four airborne destroyer drones, and six anti-asteroid space crafts. That's all, folks. Enough to 'Remember the Alamo.' Then they come and eat everyone. Or make us slaves. Or somewhere in between those two."
"How do we know they're hostile?" Mike, from Sector Seventeen in Moscow, asked.
"They didn't try to contact us. They didn't do anything close to that. All they did was show up and then something shuts down our major communications network leaving six billion floating in the dark. That's what everyone is doing right now, people. Floating in the dark and scared to death. It's our job to turn the lights back on. We only have three days to do that. Then the jacks into the back of their heads start to overheat from buildup, then POP! goes the weasel. Which is our more immediate problem. Any takers?"
I raised my hand. "Are the hard drives in individual sectors affected by the shutdown of the Net?"
"No. It's just the Net. The Sector hard drives were left independent," Jane said.
"Well, what if we use images and data from each sector's hard drive and set it on a continuous loop to the tanks. Like reruns on a TV. Might buy us some time," I said.
“How much time?" she asked, looking hopeful.
I shrugged. All of it was theoretical. “Maybe a month, if we alternate visual stimulus every hour or so. But after a month, it could get risky," I said.
She laughed. "If we haven't figured out a response to our visitors in a month, I think alternating visual stimulus will be the least of our worries."
That got a laugh from the room. Jane nodded and the room got quiet again. "All right, I've alerted all of the robots in each of your sectors of our problem. And my plan...well, I don't like it. We're not prepared for this, but we need to save as many people as we can. We're going to start waking people up. Not all of them at once, but right now the figures I’m looking at are about ten thousand in each sector. Since we have a thousand robots in each sector, that works out to about a ten to one ratio. All of the robots will fall under each of you. So, you all are now officially mayors of your own little towns."
The room groaned.
"Too bad, guys. Get used to it. We'll be waking up seventy percent women," loud cheers from the room interrupted her momentarily, "and thirty percent men. And no, they will not become your own personal harem, Scott," Jane said, looking at me with the smirk that made us all love her. I gave her the finger as everyone laughed.
"These people are going to be in shock. They've been living in a fantasy world for a long time and have forgotten what it’s like to be a person. It's going to be up to us to remind them how to live in this world."
"What about the Aliens?" John Shane asked.
"They don't get here for four days. I want you all back here in two, on the twenty-eighth. I'll send you updates every hour. You job right now is to get everything set up with your robots, get the continuous loop for the tanks running, and make sure those ten thousand people are breathing and fed. I don't care if they run around your sectors stark naked. If they're cold, they can huddle together for warmth. That's it." Jane began to walk off the stage. But then she turned back around. "Oh, and one more thing: keep a weapon on you. These people aren't going to be too happy."
Yours truly,
Scott G. Douglas,
Sector Eight, North America
June 26, 2234
Chapter Seven
Dear Reader,
The weapon idea wasn't bad. I got back to Sector Two, and Shelby had already woken up the first batch of twenty people. They were a nice enough bunch, mostly attractive females. Although, at this point I'd consider Jane's girlfriend Rebecca attractive, and she strongly resembles one of my dogs.
All of them were quiet, except for this one guy. He thought we shut down the Net ourselves and kept going on with things like, "You're infringing on our rights! We don't deserve this kind of treatment!"
I walked into the room. He was starting to get loud, yelling, "Plug us back in!"
I went up to the naked man, looked him square in the eyes, and said, "Listen, did the nice robot lady tell you what’s going on?"
"Who are you?" the angry, naked man asked.
"Scott Douglas. I'm the Janitor for Sector Two."
"So the Janitors planned all of this?" He lunged at me.
I swept my foot under his, knocking him to the ground. Then I jumped on top of him and pulled my pistol out of my belt, putting it in his face.
“Listen to me very carefully." I fired four rounds into the air. Then the pistol returned into his forehead. "This is not the Net. I don't care what level of Dragon Master you are. This is the real world. If I shoot you, you die. The only two problems your death would give me are where to bury you and what to tell my boss when she finds out. I can live with those consequences. You won't. So, are you going to shut up and do everything you're told from now on, or do I pull this trigger and see how many extra lives you have?"
"I'll be good," he said.
I got off him and smiled. "Great."
Then I looked at Shelby to see if she was ok. She nodded. Then I left. I knew Shelby. She got the others to calm down by talking about their feelings or whatever.
Later, I checked the updates from Jane. There still hadn't been any progress on the aliens, but the continuous loop idea of mine was working. I checked the clock. It was three a.m. and we had four hundred and six people out of the tanks. I told her in an e-mail we should get people out of the tanks faster. If we kept one in ten awake and sedated the rest, we wouldn’t be so overwhelmed.
Eventually, those one in ten should be functioning enough to take care of the other nine. We were doing twenty per hour and only fourteen deaths. Those who didn’t make it were people who... I guess couldn't quite deal with being out of the Net. Granted, most of them weren't really coping with it. We had only thirty that we didn't have to sedate and the robots are currently getting them settled in. Shelby said that she had people checking the thirty out to see who would be leadership material. Cause god knows we can't baby sit all these fucking people forever, especially if E.T. gets violent.
Shelby stopped by my office around four a.m. I poured myself a fourth drink. She smiled. "How's it going?"
"You still on the shrink clock or have you punched out yet?" I asked.
"Taking the rest of the week off."
I laughed and pushed a chair up to her.
She was taken aback. " I…uh..."
"What?" I said.
"You've never invited me to sit down before. In fact, you usually don't let me in here at all." She wouldn’t look at me.
I rolled my eyes. “Quit being a dumbass and sit down."
She sat, still somewhat unsure.
"Do you have the alcohol upgrades?" I asked.
“No. I don't even have the sex upgrades. Just a standard issue silver body," she said.
I smiled and pointed a finger at her huge breast. “As big as those are, sweetheart, I don't think those were standard issue. At least a D-Cup."
Then she winked at me. "Double-D's. I knew a guy who knew a guy."
I laughed. I'd never seen a...real side of her before.
"Shelby, how many years have you been assigned to me?"
"Well, you drove your last therapist to quit...forty years ago, with that peanut butter and elephant incident."
I laughed. "You know, I'd forgotten all about that. Anyway, my point is that in all the many years you've spent annoying me, I have no idea what you did when you were a person."
She folded her arms. "What does that mean, a person? Aren't I a person now?"
I rolled my eyes. "No, you're the mind of a person in a robot body. But you know what I mean. What did you do before The Download?"
Then she hesitated and whispered, "I was a soldier."
"You were..." I began, but I couldn't even process the thought.
"I was in the Final War. When the bombs went off at Jerusalem, I was with my unit fighting in Cairo. Once the mushroom clouds covered Israel, we surrendered. After the Oslo War Trials, we were all sentenced to mandatory download. We didn't think it was going to be that bad, but...I can’t quite explain this to someone who hasn't been inside the Net. We were turned into anti-virus programs, data processing scrubbers, anything the Net needed to operate. Your basic human has more processing power than any computer out there. And we were put to use."
"Shelby, you never told me this."
“Well, Mr. Douglas, you never asked." She got up and left. I wanted to stop her and say I was sorry for all the years of me being my normal jackass self. But I didn't. After a few minutes, I got up and grabbed my trash and headed down the hallway to the compacter. Then I left the kitchen and went to my room, but on the way, I passed a closet and heard a machine crying.
It was the saddest thing I'd ever heard.