Beautifully written story! It reminded me of (related stories spoilers)
John Barnes’ Kaleidoscope Century (1995), which similarly goes through a future-shock laden life trajectory, plus shares some other themes with your story. The progressive sense of future shock here is also like “The Big Sleep,” a short story about economics and cryogenics, and the vertiginous sense of your possibly being flung into the future at any moment reminds me of something in qntm says in Fine Structure:
”The simplest way to put it is this: once digitised, your mind could be sent anywhere, anytime. As you’ve mentioned yourself, it’s thought that within a few decades it will become possible to store an arbitrary amount of data in a single fundamental particle, itself stored in a device as small as a basketball… or a thumb… or a fingernail. You will be copied and copied and copied all over the world. Copies of your mind-state—the first digitised human mind-state in history, remember—could survive until the end of human civilisation. After you go to sleep this afternoon, one of you will wake up tomorrow morning. There is, let us say, a one in a million chance that you will wake up tomorrow morning. The rest of you are embarking on a subjectively instantaneous one-way journey into the uttermost unknown, where, beyond a few decades into the future, your single physical self will not be able to protect you. You will be completely without support or protection or preparation… This is the most dangerous thing anybody has ever done.”
Beautifully written story! It reminded me of (related stories spoilers)
John Barnes’ Kaleidoscope Century (1995), which similarly goes through a future-shock laden life trajectory, plus shares some other themes with your story. The progressive sense of future shock here is also like “The Big Sleep,” a short story about economics and cryogenics, and the vertiginous sense of your possibly being flung into the future at any moment reminds me of something in qntm says in Fine Structure:
”The simplest way to put it is this: once digitised, your mind could be sent anywhere, anytime. As you’ve mentioned yourself, it’s thought that within a few decades it will become possible to store an arbitrary amount of data in a single fundamental particle, itself stored in a device as small as a basketball… or a thumb… or a fingernail. You will be copied and copied and copied all over the world. Copies of your mind-state—the first digitised human mind-state in history, remember—could survive until the end of human civilisation. After you go to sleep this afternoon, one of you will wake up tomorrow morning. There is, let us say, a one in a million chance that you will wake up tomorrow morning. The rest of you are embarking on a subjectively instantaneous one-way journey into the uttermost unknown, where, beyond a few decades into the future, your single physical self will not be able to protect you. You will be completely without support or protection or preparation… This is the most dangerous thing anybody has ever done.”