Earth Star Vision - Daily Harvesting 1000 Years From Now...

What is a job when you live in abundance? Mutualism manifest as technology...

The Earthstar Vision series of posts are my artistic response to the idea of rebuilding a world of unified nature and technology. A food forest for the entire economy of human wants. Inspired by learning indigenous knowledge and working in computer technology while studying quantum physics and biology. Inspired by dreams of a future where all life is one and many all at once. Born from the realization of the Earth as Garden & us as part of not ruler over. I don’t know if this will come true, maybe it’s just more of a vibe to strive for…

Here is a big patch, I think while looking at all the styrofoam beads of various sizes clogging up the shoreline. Mixed in with kelp and other flotsam, I reach down to grab a big plastic bottle. My thinking and eye gaze was sent to the Gomens I am accompanying and I find one sidling up to me, reaching for the bottle I have just collected while it deposits microGomens to the styrofoam mess.

If I wanted to, I could tune my Eyez to see the nanoGomens taking in the even smaller plastic bits and the picoGomens subtly vibrating with Brownian motion of finding any stray polymer molecules. Without augmentation I can see for myself the microGomens picking up pieces of styrofoam as a little line, a matter stream mixed along with nanoGomens hanging on as it moves its claw into its proboscis to clean up, repeating the process with gusto eerily reminiscent of the original crabs it was based on.

The MacroGomen lets out a low bellow up ahead, and I can see and feel my fellow work crew people look up its way as a lone man is kicking and stabbing at the synthetic creature, about the size of an ancient “garbage truck” that my parents told me about.

I am closest to the MacroGomen so I think-feel out to my friend Aytha next to me and our shared Gomen accompaniment - I’ll go look, you keep watch of this area. I feel my friend agree and sense my Gomens temporarily switching over to xer control.

“Excuse me sir,” I say loudly as I approach the man still kicking and now spitting at the MacroGomen.

“Fucking machine devil monster, get off this beach! You ain’t nothing but trouble!” The man is shrieking.

My Eyez flash a quick warning: his neurotransmitter levels out of norm, substance abuse suspected. Automatically notifying local AvatarMEDIC and Community Patrol elements - proceed with caution.

So careful in this era, I think, remembering the stories granddad used to tell about the old timey ‘police’ showing up after crimes happened!

“Sir, please you won’t gain anything by messing with this Gomen,” I try to say, but the man turns to me as I’m talking and locks bloodshot eyes with me.

“You!” He points at me with an unsteady hand, “are just one of those good for nothing welfare kids, fed by the trees like savages and using all your goddam biotech to clutter up this fine view!”

“Sir, you can think that, but I still need you to stop hitting this Gomen, the community patrol is coming and an AvatarMEDIC is worried about us - are you ok?” I ask, cutting the bullshit because it’s near the end of my shift and I’ve dealt with these old timers before. He’s probably a religious nut, thinks ‘only god can make creatures’ and that I’m the devil or whatever. Tell it to my granddad, I just live here.

“All your socialist crap troopers can come get me! They won’t even hurt me or bankrupt me or anything glorious like in the old days” and his eyes grow misty and trail off. Wow is he really that old? I knew the lifeforce Gomens were powerful but why are they sparing this guy?

I guess something snaps in me because I switch from soothing to aggressive with him, “listen fucker, if you want to live in hell like our ancestors did in the early 21cen where getting hurt meant you’d be in debt and being arrested meant you could never get a job then why don’t you go to one of those end century cosplay reserves in Nevada, just fuck off and let us do our job cleaning up all the damn mess from those so called great old days!” I’m practically screaming. Whoa, calm down I feel some of the other Gomen attendants reach out to me through our heart field.

The man is taken aback, but then there’s fire in his eyes. Oh I see this is what he wants, recognition, someone to talk to. Guess even in this era there are still lonely old men.

Just before he can reply to me, a community patrol person walks up to his side.

“Hello Thomas,” she says to the man her tone carries friendliness mixed with annoyance, “hitting the garbage crew again I see?”

He looks embarrassed, but then I feel something snap in him and he turns to lunge at the Community Patroller, which is deflected instantly by her ambient personal space force field.

“Ok that’s a strike Thomas, we’re going to have to take you to a detox tree, come on,” and I can see the faint glimmer of a confinement field appear around him as the CP walks away and this Thomas fellow is pulled along as if by an invisible net. An AvatarMEDIC is silently hovering overhead now following them, aloft on its ion thruster pads and no doubt synthesizing an antidote for whatever exotic new drug this poor sap decided to snag from an illicit synthTree.

The large MacroGomen that was getting harassed emits a cheery “Arigato!” To me and I feel some credibility grow in my relation to the Gomens. Tricky thing that ‘credibility’, the Gomens learned over the last 800 years that only certain people can be their leaders, so we’re all always being evaluated.

“No problem,” I say and head back toward my Gomen flock when I see a timer appear before me indicating that my shift is ending soon. I can feel my replacement heading down the street and I turn to my Gomen partner and my friend Aytha who both wave at me goodby - guess I can go home a bit early.

I like morning shifts because then I get the rest of the day to explore the fractal forest inland and then later hang out with my lifemate, Shar.

Most people don’t go to the forests anymore once they have collected a few diamond fruit processors that work for them during their coming of age ritual, but I like to go back and see if any new designs have evolved since I was last there - after all the point of this era is to let the plants do the designing, and the sun is always shining on them, so I like to keep up to date.

Plus I have a hobby as a quantum optimization farmer, well collector really as I only maintain a few fractal plant instances, but it adds more prestige to house MelvShar (that’s mine and Shar’s house name in the ForestNet) and its fun to think-feel with the carbonComps about what new aspect of energy transformation is under review by the GlobalBioMind.

What were people thinking back in the day trying to study physics alone without plants’ help? Once we people started think-feeling with the flora and fauna again, we learned just how much thinking gets in our way of direct experience! Who knows quantum optimization better than a photosynthesizer who is doing it in real time since well before we were even existent. Math abstractions can’t compete with actual reality for the hard problems, that’s what granddad always said.

My legs are a bit tired from standing around with the Gomens this morning, so I feel out for a freshly fabbed Strider. I get the ‘over here’ pinging sensation in my chest and follow it to a squat fabTree. I shake off some of the foliage and reveal a bit of a chewed up Strider, the Carbotanium weave starting to grow moss in its seams, so it was fabbed maybe even last season.

I pull out the backpack straps and feel the Strider wake up, like a cough and shudder as its picofusion bioreactor turns on and courses ions through the nanotubes to warm up synthmuscles.

It rises up onto its two legs and I step backwards into it, and when I feel I’m ready it embraces me lightly yet firmly so that now I am wearing it as an exoskeleton.

I do some hops, up and down. Nice spring to the step, I think as I gain a few meters of height on each jump. I normally prefer freshly fabbed techFruit, but maybe it's good to find older striders since they’ve had more time to self-optimize while they wait for a user.

My strider in order, I head over towards the Eastern Fractal Forest. As I get closer the megaMesquite bushes give way to scrub MegaPines that greet me with a calming high pitched field of bioenergy, and I can start to feel the Diamond Pines vibrating further back behind them.

A PowerBird flys by exchanging a magnetic energy loop with my Strider that makes its chest feathers glow. Off to rebalance that power to some other part of the City Forest I guess.

Power birds were among the first of the truly New life that has changed the planet and reclaimed it. Back when those Barcelona hackers figured out how to bioprint pigeons that worked with the Metalife grid, where before only CarboSiliconMetallic morphing robotics had been around. And they only did a few tasks like maintain the internet and power network owned by MetaLife. But once powerbirds started flying around, the whole ‘extracting rents’ game changed as the birds didn’t know how to collect payment, and didn’t care! That began the cascade effect where more biotechnology began working with itself to create the Forest Civilization that we all live in today.

When my granddad first told me about all the effort that the prior generations spent doing ‘accounting’ I was so puzzled - why waste time quantifying energy exchange, just beneficially exchange it!

He laughed and winked, “entropy used to be the game son, making things more complex and abstract was the whole of business, that was before Extropy changed business to making things more livable and free.”

An original squirrel is on the side of a Diamond tree closest to me. I glance up toward its fractal pine cones of diamond-nitrogen quantum processors, most of these I’ve seen before.

Oh wait, here’s a new one, I feel out to the very top of the tree and sense a new kind of vibration that I haven’t felt before. My Eyez show me the structure of this DPineCone is laced with sapphire. I wonder what it does?

I desire to grow taller and the strider does its best, but I’m still quite small compared to this big tree.

I laugh “It’s ok strider” I say to it feeling a bit bad that I let my desire be big enough to form a command for it, it feels me more than hears me but grandpa used to talk to them and so I carried over the habit, “can you find me a flying Gomen?” I say half to my strider and half to myself as I scan the skys with my heart and eyes.

There, I feel a reflection ping off a flying gomen’s energy field. It is coming this way. I think about the pinecone I’m after and I see its four wings wafting it down with its four grasping legs extended.

It plucks the Dcone off and brings it down to me. I give it a wash of heartfelt gratitude and remember that I had some dead microGomens in my pocket that I was saving for my home bioreactor, but instead I throw them up to the flying Gomen and a small opening appears on its front side as it absorbs the useful nutrients.

“Arigato” it says in a strange rattling voice and wooshes up back to its life.

Now that I’m holding this unique Dcone in my hand I can start to see what it is good at. I pull a biooptic filament line from my personal notebook and touch it to the Dcone where its end morphs into unison at the base where it was connected to the tree.

I send it the standard quantum optimization problems, traveling gomenTender, infinite waterfalls and mathapolooza: factors galore.

It’s still thinking about the math and the paths when I feel it climb past nine hundred Trillion simultaneous waterfalls. Whoa, that’s impressive.

I dip into my analytics layer and my Eyez confirms that the now one Trillion and growing waterfalls are all perfect recreations of real water - each a perfect 1:1 simulation at quantum reality ground truth, each expressing the still larger uncountable waveform of possibility.

I’ve found a specialized clear Dcone, these are rare!

At a still not infinite but pretty close 22 Trillion simultaneous waterfalls being simulated, all of them cease to exist. Nice, that’s the highest count I’ve ever found! The knowledge layer of Earth pings back to me that it’s a rare one indeed, the record is still only 27 Trillion waterfalls.

I un-seat the filament and tuck the Dcone into my front pocket.

The Cetaceans will love this Dcone, as I have been hearing in their work chatter songs that they want to have more processing power to think about the currents of the ocean for their shipping and travel routes. Maybe this Dcone will have what it takes to hold a 1:1 model of the ocean - it currently takes several hundred Dcones and other processors to hold such a model.

So maybe evolution got lucky in my backyard since it looks like with this little quantum module we just went through another singularity! This happened to my buddy Deepra with a lotus computational pond he was tending was able to simulate the whole solar system four hundred times instead of just the previous record of four.

I think that’s enough fun for today as my stomach growls and I turn around to head home. There’s some berries in season, and my senses direct me toward a packet at the foot of a tree left by an Acorn Mash gomen. A little treat it leaves around for animals that help the cause. I bite right in, remembering learning about what was once called ‘packaging’ that could not be eaten and realizing why my morning chosen work of cleanup gig still exists even after all these years.

As I descend out of the eastern mountains in long loping glides, I am joined by some deer. They hop along side me then veer off to the right as up ahead, I gasp, a mountain lion!

I keep striding but feel its gaze follow me. My personal field nanites would keep me me safe like every other sapient in this world, but the mountain lion could still try to test it so I pick up the pace with a steely resolve of no nonsense. I am after all a strider combat champ three abundance festivals running but I’d rather not fight for the title again with a mountain lion.

The big cat’s cool gaze follows me out of the mountains. I'm glad it is content to observe.

When personal fields made guns obsolete they also brought back a sharper relationship to big game. Less about death more about respect, at least I hope.

Back in the forest micro city of old Pacific Beach, I turn past the community health pyramid made of Garnet back toward my home tree.

Nothing fancy, a twenty-room megaOak from the earlier days.

I detach from the strider and step out from its now loosened embrace. It sinks down into the the bioreclaimer port for rehab and reuse by anyone else who wants a strider. Next to it are a few others in various states of lichen and moss covered age. Some people like to keep their items for a long time, good thing the trees can repair and not just fabricate. I turn up the spiral ridges toward my room portal.

As I near the portal it grows open and Shar is there to greet me, belly looking more full of our offspring than I remember.

“Hi honey, I’m home!” I say jokingly as we fall into the house kissing while the portal regrows closed behind us.

Author’s Note:

The story is all written by hand by me, a human that hopes you will become an aid subscriber to help sustain me in late stage capitalism! The imagery was generated from my prompting by Ideogram and Bing image generator. I knew it would be controversial and it is. Some like it and are excited, others forbid it and close rank around human hands and crafts. I’m motivated to explore the ethics of it more, where is the line that crosses from ‘stolen work’? The computer I type on is also wage theft in its assembly, the minerals extracted by impoverished people while I can use it to type, by hand. Where is the line that crosses? How can we ethically make art in capitalism? We have to try. I view the new AI like a plastic bag that is here and won’t go away yet must be transformed into liberation. It is a theft, and so is the entire western civilization. So my heart screams to use any and all resource into the cause, our sin our virtue each has no escape. All of it here on a planet floating in space.