Wong Ray stepped out of the taxi.

More specifically, the 3D organic printer in the back of the taxi copied him from his apartment study overlooking Nouveau Beijing to the moment he exited the taxi for the opening of the museum exhibit.

He shut down his self in the study so only one version would walk Earth in the next 12 hours.

Wong wanted to meet Facile, the high-level U.S. official who had paid off his IT subordinates to build a backdoor in all U.S. computer systems that were easily “hacked” by Wong’s government after given instructions on how to operate the backdoor without being detected.

Facile did not want to name his price except in person.

Both Wong and Facile rearranged their facial features, postures and mannerisms so that neither one would recognise the other in public.

Wong sat on a bench and pretended to admire the nuances of an old theremin installation set up in the entryway of the new exhibit, “Perks of the Job: Luxury Business Gifts of the 20th Century.”

A group of teenagers dressed in postzombie apocalypse gear jumped up and down to play a series of high-pitched staccato notes on the theremin.

As the kids walked on, one of them dropped a program under Wong’s bench.

Wong put on his reading glasses, picked up the program and read a note scribbled in old-fashioned invisible ink revealed by the filter in Wong’s eyeglass lenses.

The time, 20:23, had been written next to a circle around the program text, “Item 47A, Engraved Golf Rangefinder.”

Wong nodded at people entering the exhibit, wondering which one was Facile.

The museumgoers looked at Wong and saw an elderly Chinese woman, her sheer, white satin shawl accenting the pearl-encrusted, pink blouse and unfashionable pearescent miniskirt that Wong picked to shock the usual conservative types who attended museum openings.

At 20:20, Wong casually walked over to the display case containing items 45 to 50.

A young man, wearing a retro business suit of the late 20th Century – yellow ‘power’ tie, white starched shirt, dark blue sports coat with narrow lapels, matching trousers and tasseled brown leather shoes – stared at Wong.

Wong motioned the man over.

“Excuse me, kind sir. Do you know what a cigarette lighter is?”

“Yes. An archaic device used to ignite lung torture devices by crusty old gentlemen on clueless 20th Century foxes.”

“What is a 20th Century Fox?”

“A species that went extinct in the mid-2010s. Would you like to go somewhere for a drink?”

“Only if I’m buying.”

“How much are you willing to pay for it?”

“‘It’?”

“Yes, it. You know, I-T.”

“You needn’t be so obvious, young man. I know what you want.”

Wong walked to the next case, fully convinced the young man was Facile playing the role of a guy who liked to seduce older women.

“Say, did you know they had to use their fingers to communicate on computers back then?”

‘Facile’ nodded. “Barbaric, not to mention inefficient.”

As they walked, Wong placed his hand on the man’s forearm, squeezing sufficiently to transfer a few microscopic beads into a receptacle in Facile’s skin that would dissolve the bead and break down the contents to find a bank account number in a secret lunar location.

If the man wasn’t Facile, the bead would disintegrate in a few minutes through body heat.

They stopped in front of a display of a perpetual desk calendar bearing the logo of a defunct cosmetics company.

Facile turned to Wong. “That’s a lovely ring. May I see it?”

Wong held up his hand to Facile’s.

Facile grasped Wong’s hand long enough for their microcurrent circuits to exchange verification of Facile’s decoding the bank account info.

“How about I take a raincheck on that drink?”

Wong nodded.

After Facile walked away, Wong made his way to the exit, stepping into a special taxi that allowed him to upload the evening’s info to his self back home, reactivate it, and incinerate the version in the backseat of the taxi, the parts reusable by the next investigative journalist disguised as a gov’t agent disguised as dis guy in dese guys’ disguise.

Sunlight broke over the rooftop, spilling into the courtyard.

Leigh blinked.

She found a list of old titles and skimmed through two of them, “Homo Evolutis” and Buckley’s “Who’s On First.”

A thinline between fiction and nonfiction disappeared as transparency revealed the true noisiness of the universe.

A birdfeeder made of broken scarlet glass sent dancing, swaying light reflections scurrying across the courtyard floor.

Who had arranged her states of energy?

How was she able to travel from one universe to another with ease?

What was the difference between true joy and joy artificially induced by mass market hypnosis?

If joy was simply a sudden change in a small portion of one’s states of energy, themselves artificially arranged to begin with, then was anything ever genuinelu authentic, having originated from previously active, autonomous states of energy, themselves artificially arranged, too?

Leigh calculated the types of people she would encounter and selected subroutines that would subtly alter her appearance throughout the day.

She was expected to speak to several large groups interested in her plans for establishing family-based colonies on Mars.

Hired by a sorority sister, Satguar, after Leigh left college to build a series of motivational speaker bots, Leigh had studied Satguar’s company goals for Terraform Corp.

Together, they devised a matrix of ten ten-year plans that predicted the outcome of most literary, political and business output for the next three years.

Solidly so.

Leigh’s motivational bots, identical in almost every aspect to Leigh herself, were not consciously aware they were duplicates of Leigh.

Every bot assumed it was the original and the others were duplicates.

Leigh had forgotten which body was supposed to be her original.

She had stopped caring.

New memories gathered by the bots were cross-referenced wirelessly throughout the day.

Leigh had long ago paid off zombie net hackers to let her use the net to update her selves anywhere and anytime across the solar system.

A chimney’s shadow crawled across the birdfeeder, its colour turning a dull maroon.

Leigh finished her dandelion salad, took a bite of croissant and washed it down with the last swallow of chicory coffee.

She blinked again, reviewing the day’s schedule stored in her thoughts.

Two bots were out of service for experimental upgrade testing.

She and a half dozen other bots were meeting with officials and people on the street this morning to promote a new set of family values found only on Mars.

Tonight, they’d speak subliminally through music concerts, online immersive thought nets and adverts hidden in people’s everyday environs, city or country.

They were also slated to appear on various talk shows throughout the day, their external appearances so different that no one realised they were actually the same internally.

Facial recognition was ubiquitously transparent but DNA recognition was still restricted due to to business and political leaders not wanting the general populace to know how many clones existed.

Leigh used every available tool to sell Satguar’s parents’ dream of settling Mars and rebooting society at the same time.

Buncar opened his eyes to stop reading the book downloaded to his optic nerve memory.

Sure, he was old-fashioned like that, preferring the linear text method to full-immersion stories.

He looked at the folding chair on which he rested his left foot.

Sensing Buncar’s mood, the chair changed the fabric pattern to cheer up Buncar.

Buncar frowned.

What happened to the days when his hunting cabin was a getaway-from-it-all?

The living room monitor upped the pheromone therapy treatment, relaxing Buncar’s tense shoulder muscles.

Buncar closed his eyes and picked up where he left off reading “It was the best of dregs, it was the worst of dregs,” pop fiction about the Great Cyclical Recession of the 2010s.

His buddies setting up blinds to hunt Terraform pseudodeer could wait for him to join them later that sol, especially since he’d already closed the business deal with Genzhou at breakfast, Buncar’s sole reason for the hunting expedition.

Despite advances in automatic technical spec generation and computerised empathetic business contract negotiation, nothing satisfied an oldtimer like Buncar as an all-expenses-paid trip to the ice cap wilds of Mars with similarly minded intuitive sales execs.

Plus, the bonus off this sale would pay for his wife and him to enjoy a second honeymoon on Ganymede.

2032 was a tough year in space exploration.

Policy and procedure writers continue to debate the decision that Terraform Corp made.

Although the company would never pinpoint who made the final call, researchers demonstrated that weeks of internal discussions led to vague conclusions.

Game designers had long ago given their players similar scenarios to work through.

If an Earth-to-Mars transportation vehicle suffers major life support damage, do you use automatic pilot to land the vehicle and give the dead passengers proper burial rites, or do you allow the vehicle to burn up in reentry as a fiery tribute to early pioneer settlers of Mars?

Terraform Corp executives, stuck with their decision – using robotic equipment to remove the dead passengers, giving them a “burial at sea” in order to preserve fuel for the remaining journey to Mars – did not endear them with the general public at the time they ran for public office.

In hind sight, their decision looks wise because the extra fuel provided early settlers an irreplaceable resource when repairs were needed after a major dust storm in 2034.

Satguar relaxed her grip on the handlebars.

“What are you doing?” Mannow, her tandem bike mate, asked.

“Trusting my sense of balance.”

She closed her eyes and felt the texture and tilt of the road surface speak to her body.

She knew the race course’s twists and turns, having driven them dozens of times.

Satguar smelled an approaching rain storm, sensing it only minutes from soaking the tandem teams competing for the Terraform Corp Grand Prize.

She pressed her torso to the bike’s frame, bending her head to reduce the bike’s friction profile and leaned hard, pedaling in unison with her partner.

She could hear the three teams ahead of struggling to exit the hairpin turn that rose thirty-five degrees for 500 metres.

Remembering the breathing techniques her parents taught her at age three, Satguar released her thoughts from attachment to external stimuli and triggered the reserve of hormones and energy solution stored in undetectable pouches surgically attached to switch neurons, nicknamed “zippers,” she had trained years to activate for a moment like this.

They sped by the three teams in rapid succession.

They crossed the finish line an hour later, ten minutes ahead of the closest team.

As they held up the trophy, Satguar broke her normal determined look and grinned.

The motto of Terraform Corp, “Satisfaction Guaranteed,” the inspiration for her name, Satguar, stood three metres high, given to her by her parents, an American female astronaut and Russian male cosmonaut, who conceived Satguar in the ISS at the same time they came up with the idea for Terraform Corp.

They had the foetus removed after the mission and raised in a surrogate mother, an astronaut trainee, to hide the pregnancy, waiting until the right moment to announce the first human child conceived in space, low-orbit or otherwise.

A house fly, seeking the open world of a fly’s life, buzzed against the window.

Lee looked at his chewed-down fingernails.

He relished the victory of getting politicians to perform their patriotic duties to save the republic from economic doom by refusing salaries, perks or graft from government jobs.

Lee lit a candle, meditated for a few minutes and watched spider webs in the woods send silent reflective codes across the crowded airwaves to his eyes.

Only so much time left to live.

He knew that modern technology decreased the time until boredom set in.

Readers wanted an entertaining storyline that attracted their sympathies toward and/or away plots, themes and characters.

Lee wondered how much doubt and paranoia was good for competition.

He had one goal, a lifelong goal, to establish Earth-based lifeforms off this planet.

A second fly joined the first at the lip of a skylight.

Twenty minutes had passed since the candle was lit.

Lee snuffed the wick.

A thin trail of smoke, a million wisps of translucent spider threads, rose to the ceiling, chasing the flies.

He could open the airlocks to let the flies out of the room.

After all, flies didn’t understand ambient temperature, oxygen content or 3D projections that simulated a wooded backyard.

Lee had grown up in this Martian laboratory, watching the 3D imagery become more realistic – trees changing and growing through the seasons, birds and insects flying past, rain and snow falling while making the appropriate sounds/temperatures changes to the windows and skylights.

When he reached maturity, his bionic caregiver taught him about the harshness of Martian atmospheric conditions, spending weeks training Lee on the use of a full-body covering that protected him when he was ready to step into the airlocks and wander the Martian landscape.

Lee sent a house fly into the airlock.

The fly did not appear in the window view outside the airlock.

Lee opened the airlock and the fly was gone.

A hint something was amiss.

Lee decided then and there to create or find an environment on another world where he and house flies could roam freely.

His great-great grandparents had come from Earth and left him instructions not to return.

He mentally connected to the laboratory computer network to check his simulation results.

Were enough supplies available to build a gravity-defying vehicle to get him away from Mars and on to a place where his Earth-based plants and animals could thrive outside?

Another twenty minutes had passed but time had no meaning to Lee.

His virtual friends came and went without a connection to time or reason.

He logged the moment and sent it out to his impatient fans on Earth who wanted every detail of his normal celebrity life as the only living, laboratory-created person on Mars.

Or so they told him.

He didn’t know or care.

He had an outer space ship to design and build.

Or so he led himself to believe, he and his fans unaware he was a computer simulation himself.

Grecromscot looked at the numbers.

Traced the trend back to 2011, when leaders of the U.S. conceded defeat and handed financial management over to the Committee’s international project managers who had sworn an oath of impartiality and given up their personal lives to rescue our species from political manipulators.

Grecromscot reran the plot, doublechecking the upper and lower limits.

It was as s/he expected.

The empathy routines added in 2020 had developed several submotives of their own, keeping the data within parameters, not setting off alarms to humans, but playing empathetic games against one another.

Grecromscot reviewed the algorithms of the automatic code generators.

Sure enough, they had not had an empathy routine upgrade for several revision update cycles.

From an anthropological viewpoint, they were out-of-sync emotionally.

Grecromscot checked shis own memory circuits to ensure s/he was current.

Affirmative.

All gender glands functioned within tolerance, equally balanced according to updated scientific research released a few nanoseconds ago into the Solar System network (solSysNet) from Earth’s lunar labs.

S/he laughed, remembering the class wars of the early 21st century, when a secret army of under/unemployed people attacked the elite nouveau riche aristocrats, starting with the fall of a media empire baron.

The attacks first appeared as cybersecurity breaches and then spread into the streets once enough cash liquidity was made available for disguised movements of “tourists” to areas of the world populated by millionaires and billionaires.

The tired, the hungry, the poor and the overworked refused to give up one labor credit more for the high-stakes risktaking of unattached emotional wealth hoarders. No bunkers or island getaways were safe from angry hired help.

One by one, the wealthy disappeared, some through “accidents” and some through tiger kidnapping.

Recipients of large sums of money – by way of wills, trusts, pensions, political reelection funds, lotteries or other windfalls – were given the opportunity to donate their wealth to the New Revolution or disappear inconveniently.

Fear spread.

Unemployment rose.

When police and military refused to fire on large crowds storming Wall Street, restricted minimansion subdivisions and banks, the U.S. government announced dissolution of its sovereignty, in a joint announcement with other major countries, to avert complete economic and social disaster.

Stock market values plummeted.

Flash mobs increased, panicked and enraged.

Food and fuel distribution networks collapsed, causing riots and farm/ranch raids.

Seed and fertilizer prices soared.

All because the U.S. failed to coordinate a public international forum on exorcising the demons of the Great Recession in order to reorganize global financial networks operated by nonpartisan, sympathetic people rather than cold, unemotional, nonempathetic computer subroutines and high-risk speculators.

Grecromscot smiled, or thought s/he smiled, shis emotional feedback routine told shim, happy that wealth was measured differently in 2050.

Lee stood on the driveway, in the space above random cracked patterns, streaks of green and brown algae, ant trails, pieces of dead cicadas, half-eaten hickory nuts, sweetgum balls, lichen-covered twigs, and a plain brown envelope.

One redcap mushroom remained in the woods beside the driveway.

The 1995 BMW 325i, white with black skirts, sat parked at the top of the driveway like the obedient bulldog it pretended to be.

A stack of balsa wood strips waited for Lee’s motivational moment to glue the strips together, creating a large block from which a carved, 3D, angry UT Smoky the bluetick hound dog would appear, mounted to the BMW’s front bumper like a snarling mascot emerging from inside the engine compartment.

Lee stood mesmerised by glistening green leaves of a deciduous forest wetted by summer thunderstorms that passed overhead a few hours ago.

Could Lee predict the next ten U.S. presidents?

What if Lee could, instead, predict how feedback loops within feedback loops would slowly convert people to more sustainable living standards?

Positive, not negative.

Evolutionary paradigm shifts at revolutionary speeds.

Working backwards 1,000 years from now.

He already had the data.

How did he keep people motivated in 1,000-day increments?

Or, rather, how did his network of computer programmers, business associates and the rest of the seven billion units of states of energy interact profitably, redirecting survival techniques without resorting to altruistic methods or disrupting hoarding behaviour brought on by years of mass media-induced negative reinforcement?

Lee looked at his/her multiple personalities spread across a universe of external memory cues.

It was time to go to the next phase.

He ripped open the envelope.

His instructions to himself from the future waited to be implemented.

No more passive voice.

Take action! In this moment!

Now!