An Ecology of MInd (40 page)

"So you are going to dump this on me and leave," asked Chris.

Michael rose to his feet and smiled. "Yes. Welcome to your new adolescence in the next phase of your life. I'm sure you will make mistakes, but we all do.
You just learn from them the best you can and hopefully do better next time."

Michael's body sank into the floor beneath him, and he was gone.

MICHAEL SURFACED A FEW MILES away from Chris' house. He had altered his appearance so that he no longer looked like Michael. He began to walk down the road
towards a diner he'd wanted to try. He had heard the food they served was amazing.

He felt Chris had handled things better than he had expected. He was upset yes, but he should adapt fine. He hoped so anyway.

He also realized that Chris had not fully understood his situation yet and would realize more implications with time. For example, he did not mention
Margret, Nora or Cody. The immortality did not extend to them, and Michael did not think he had realized that fact yet. He could use his new powers to
extend their lives greatly if he chose, and he suspected he would, but that would not prevent death from accident or being murdered if Chris was not close
by to protect them. There was a large difference between long life and immortality as Michael knew well.

His original plan was to provide immortality to Chris by having one of his drones shadow him continuously from two to three miles away. He could have even
done it from underground. While it was possible to do this when you had many bodies, having a single body like Chris would mean he could never be farther
than three hundred feet from the person or persons he wanted to keep alive. Periodic rejuvenation was fine to a point, but accidents or murder would
eventually occur. It was just a matter of time. And as he told Chris earlier, making a copy might make you feel better, but it did nothing for the person
that was killed.

No, Chris was not going to be happy with Michael for quite a while he imagined. He would give him some time to come to terms with some of the reality of
his situation before he contacted him again.

If he didn't adapt and come to terms with it, Michael was still stronger and could counteract him if he had to. He felt it was best to let Chris be for a
while though and let him grow into his new role.

While Chris' new abilities were extremely powerful, they were limited in scope and could not grow to what Michael's were. Not while Michael was alive
anyway. The higher dimensional construct he had created for Chris was an exact copy of his own with minor alterations. He had changed it to link to a
minutely altered area of brain he had placed in Chris' brain. You could use the analogy of it being a different frequency than the one between Michael and
his construct. The restrictions of range of power and not being able to create additional bodies were being actively held in place by Michael. If anything
should happen to Michael that active inhibition would cease, and Chris would have the exact same abilities and potential for growth that Michael had about
four hundred years ago, but with far more knowledge than Michael had possessed.

He reached the entrance to the diner and went inside. There was a small sign that said “Please Wait to be Seated” so he waited patiently. A waitress came
over and asked “How many?”

“A table for one please.”

The waitress seated him and after checking the menu, he ordered what had looked appealing. He was lost in thought as he waited for his food to be delivered
to the table.

He had one more thing he wanted to do as possibly his last gift to the human race. He wanted to leave some sort of legacy for humanity that would endure
and be beneficial to them. He had thought about it and thought he had just the thing.

He started the process in motion with a number of his other bodies. The whole thing would probably take a couple of hours. He created some additional
bodies at the planets Uranus and Neptune. He would use the mass of Uranus and some of the mass of Neptune to create fourteen new planet Earths and their
moons. They would be the same size and mass as Earth, but he would give them varied land masses and oceans so that each would be different. He would jump
them into position using the star drive technology, and place them in the same orbit around the Sun as the Earth.

They would essentially be a string of Earths and their moons rotating around the Sun like a series of pearls on a necklace. This would give each of the new
planets the same climatic conditions as Earth. While essentially all the same as Earth as far as a home for life, the differing land masses would make
slightly different weather patterns and give uniqueness to each planet. He would populate all the fourteen additional planets with duplicates of life from
Earth. He already had the information for the Earth, including life forms stored in his quantum memories. He would be using portions of that to create
planets rich in Earth life, with Earth-like climate conditions, but with no humans.

The planet Uranus would be gone from the solar system, and Neptune would be altered to be a smaller planet. He would have to alter the orbits all the
planets in the solar system to make the new system stable so that no collisions occur and that the orbits don't decay or collapse. Slight changes would be
needed to the velocity of Earth in its orbit as well. This would cause the length of a year to be altered just slightly. Not a lot but it would be a change
that would be able to be picked up on timepieces and with astronomical observations.

He was doing this to give humanity the potential to expand much more easily to fourteen other fully compatible planets. Some of the new planets would be
visible in the sky with the naked eye, and it may focus humanity more on expansion into space. As it was now, there were large distances to reach even
planets like Mars or Jupiter, which are inhospitable to human life. This decreased human interest in expansion beyond their home planet to minimal
excursions. The drive and excitement that were involved in the initial race to space and the moon had fizzled out.

The much easier accessibility of virgin human compatible worlds should cause a relative explosion into space. It would not be without its problems, and
power struggles but once humanity had spread to several planets, its likelihood of destroying itself should be greatly reduced.

He fully realized that the sudden appearance of these planets would cause havoc within human society, especially within the religious and scientific
communities. There would inevitably be political effects as well. He felt though that any chaos or disruption would be temporary while humanity adjusted to
the new reality.

The new planets would be created with all the natural resources that were on Earth so this would be yet another stimulus to their exploration and
colonization. This would also eventually give humanity a larger and more stable base from which to launch further excursions into space.

It should be very interesting. Over the millennia, he had grown to feel a single planet was limiting and constrictive, both for him and for what the human
race had become.

He set to work making it happen just as his dinner came.

TEACHER # WAS TASKED BY Teacher with overseeing the mining, refining and collection of mineral resources. He did his job well and efficiently. Things were
progressing rapidly. The city was full of activity, and it was quickly growing. Factories were either producing lots of new goods and materials or were
being built. All this took a lot of metal of different types but Teacher # had been good at organizing things, and everyone under his control was working
efficiently.

The original six hundred thousand eggs had all been hatched and put to work. Many more additional eggs were laid and hatched as well.

Despite this, Teacher # was not content. He felt he should be, but he was not. Teacher was a friend to him, and he had several other friends as well.
Having Teacher as a friend was a great honor, and it made him feel very good.

The problem was he felt Teacher was a bigger friend to two of his other co-workers. This bothered Teacher #. He had been thinking about the problem for a
while now, and he thought he had a solution. He had decided to kill the other two co-workers and then Teacher would be a bigger friend with no one than
him.

IT WAS A TYPICAL OCEAN ON A PLANET that was also not particularly unusual. The planet was in the backwaters of a galaxy very distant from Earth. In the
warm shallow equatorial waters, a small creature was happily eating some of its favorite type of food. The plant it was currently eating was a variety of
something similar to kelp on Earth. The creature was almost totally uninteresting. It was one of many. It was a species that basically ate and not much
else. A couple of times a year they would drop some small pods off their bodies that would eventually grow into more of their kind that would also eat and
drop pods, but that was about it.

This particular individual did not seem any different than any others of its kind. It was young and had not yet dropped any reproductive pods. It never
would.

It was a little too absorbed in enjoying its meal and did not see the predator sneaking up on it. With a final burst of speed, the predator speared the
creature with the spine on its tail and began to eat it.

The creature felt a searing pain as the spine pierced its body and then more pain as the predator began to consume its flesh. There was a lurching
sensation, and the confused creature found itself in the middle of consuming a dead meaty thing. It had the recent memory of stalking the thing and then
killing it. Amazingly, the taste of what it was eating was quite good, but the creature did not understand as it liked to eat plants. It tried to shake
itself free from the dead thing and noticed that its body did not move normally. It was still struggling and trying to understand why its body was not
behaving like it should when it felt another sharp pain and then the same disorienting lurch.

The sense of the world around it changed dramatically. The creature still felt like itself, but it also remembered being a krogol and working at the main
space station for the planet. It remembered feeling the rise of the mating urge and coming here to breed in the traditional ancestral waters. The creature
remembered grabbing and killing the grenagle for a quick snack. The granagle had been moving as if it was stunned or disoriented and had been an easy kill.
Movement was strange again, and the creature could sense and feel the triple tentacle clusters that krogol used for movement and manipulation.

Krogol's are a very intelligent space going race. This particular one was on vacation from its normal tasks for breeding purposes. The creature fully
remembered its life and ambitions to find more of its favorite weed to eat. Its thoughts seemed so much faster and complex now. The creature seemed to be
in a krogol body and have control over it. It would never have been able to comprehend that before, but the creature seemed to have the mental abilities of
the krogol along with its memories and managed to put together what had just happened. The creature's mind was so much more than before. It had been going
through life eating with almost no larger awareness. It did not even have a name for what it had been. The krogal had a name for the creature's species,
small and insignificant as they were. The krogol called them pinoochi. The krogal called the small predator that had killed the pinoochi’s body, a
grenagle.