Succesful Terminal Hedonism
Jill and Braxus were on the main deck of the Comet class starship Opportunity, eyes glued to the viewscreen. Braxus, a trexian with characteristically pastel blue skin, black eyes, and sharp teeth, sat in the pilot’s chair, manipulating instruments slightly from time to time. Jill, a thirty-three year old human female with black curly hair, leaned against the far bulkhead and tried to keep up with what was happening on the screen. She zippered her jacket up as high as it went and stuffed her hands into her pockets. It was always a little too cold for her on the Opportunity. It had been six months since she pulled Braxus from the wreckage of their shuttle in the parking lot of a Taco Bell, six months since she’d said “fuck it” and left Earth with Braxus to see the rest of the galaxy. Since then they had bounced from riftgate to riftgate, keeping a low profile. It was deeply illegal for Braxus to land on a planet that hadn’t developed system-to-system travel, and the trexian authorities would, to quote Braxus, “pull my snert out through my mouth without washing their hands first” if they caught them. Jill only learned that Braxus was a low-level criminal a few days after they departed Earth. She briefly considered demanding to be returned, but…. they were in fucking space! Last week she saw a star go supernova. Yesterday she had walked among mushroom stalks thirty feet tall. For the first time since she was eighteen Jill felt some excitement, some real visceral joy in her gut. Danger or not, Jill couldn’t imagine returning home now.
A series of beeps emanated from the viewscreen as a planet was displayed. In sharp resolution Jill could see the dark grey world, bluish clouds swaying across its surface. A series of indicators relayed information to Braxus. The trexian studied the readout closely for a moment before sucking in a breath between pursed lips. Their eye ridges glowed a faint pink, betraying their excitement.
”Well well well, “Braxus muttered, “haven’t seen one-a these in a long while, huh.”
For some reason the translator chip nestled just below the skin of Jill’s right ear gave Braxus something of a guttural cockney accent to her, and she hadn’t gotten around to asking them why that might be.
“You haven’t seen what in a long while?” Jill asked.
Braxus pivoted the chair around to look at Jill and gestured to the screen behind them.
“What you are seeing, dear ignorant human, is an example of one of the twelve recognized ends of sentient species.”
“Twelve known ends?” Jill asked, eyes flipping back and forth between the screen and Braxus’s grin, or what passed for a grin. Braxus reveled a little too much in rubbing her nose in her ignorance, but Jill could put up with a bit of douchebagery in exchange for more information.
”Yeah, twelve of um. Twelve recognized official ends. From time to time o’ course you’ll get a one-off, but the recognized ends are the most common by far.” Braxus spun the chair back around and began manipulating the controls again, but kept talking the whole time. “I knew a species wot’ voluntarily extincted itself. I knew another species, the vespits, they went and got their whole planet shoved sideways into a neighboring universe. Then there were the doogs, holy shit, they went and- “
Jill had gotten used to Braxus dancing around the point and knew she needed to keep them on target.
“Which of the twelve ends did this planet end up with? “ she said, cutting him off.
“Wa? Oh right. Well, dear ignorant human, you are looking a planet wot’ went down the path of Sucessful Terminal Hedonism. Not too many species take that particular road. No no, not a popular one, far as the ends go. Hardly any folk enticed by that path, no no. Barely anyone- “
“What is Successful Terminal Hedonism?” Jill said, flatly, again cutting Braxus off.
“Right right, well. So, across the known galaxy sentient species have asked themselves “What, ultimately, do we want? Why all this busyness with the whole being alive thing, right? And the answer is pretty much always something like happiness.”
Braxus spun in their chair again to face Jill, eye ridges flaring pink again. They leaned back with their fingers behind their head, adopting what might be called a philosophical pose.
“O course, you can argue about whatchu mean bout happiness. Species got all kinds of words that kind of all fall under the category of happiness. Fullfillment, peace, enlightenment snafyut, treglus….” Jill stopped listening as closely as Braxus started listing a string of words the translator chip couldn’t handle. She took the opportunity to stare more closely at the planet’s surface, which was clearer now as the ship approached. She had never seen a more organized planet. Even from orbital distance she could tell that this entire planet had been built over, a patterned complex of black and grey metal crisscrossing the globe. If the planet hadn’t come to an end, as Braxus had put it, she would have expected it to have lights shining up from the surface, but the planet was dark.
“…felztrup, yeetgri, and a few others I can’t remember. Anyway, we can be a little vague about what we mean by happiness. BUT!,” and here they stabbed a finger into the air, “Whatever sensation or emotion you land on, all of that ultimately boils down to whatever kind of nervous system you happen to have. They all look real different, but all of them are responsible for our conscious perception of the world, right? So, that should mean, that with the right tech, right, you could just interface with your nervous system and take the direct route: cause yourself to just feel the sensation or emotion you want to feel right?”
Jill frowned and looked back and Braxus, objections already forming in her mind.
“What, so that’d be like if humans just attached something to our brains and we could push a button and just… feel happy? Isn’t that basically like a really fancy drug?”
Braxus nodded sagely.
“It is in fact, exactly like a fancy drug.” Braxus spun around yet again and began manipulating the instruments, beginning the process of lowering the craft through the atmosphere.
“The trick is of course, that most drugs have nasty side-effects and you got to manufacture them and so on, but direct stimulation tends to be cheaper and have fewer side-effects. So, once you got that technology it doesn’t take long for someone of the species to say: ‘Hey, doesn’t this technology sort of just….skip ahead to the point of everything anyway? I mean we play games and eat food and we fuck, or whatever that species does to make more of itself, and have professions and…. all of that just seems to be a way of getting happiness, right? But this tech lets us just get happiness instantly, reliably, and way easier and cheaper? So why doesn’t everyone just wire themselves up and take a seat and enjoy?”
Jill didn’t like were this story was going. She felt a subtle kind of unease over what she thought Braxus was telling her.
“Wait wait, just, sit down and push a button and be happy? Isn’t that like, incredibly unfulfilling? And what about excitement? The feeling of something new? How can you get that just sitting down in one place, hooked up to a machine?”
Braxus shook their head.
“You’re not quite gettin it, dear ignorant human. Excitement is a feeling. The sensation of newness? Peace? Sexual pleasure? Fulfillment? Religious ecstasy? All feelings, all mediated by your nervous system, and all reliably reproducible by technology.”
Jill shook her head harder, and her brow furrowed in resistance.
“But you wouldn’t do anything. That’s fucking awful.”
Braxus shot back, “If the point of the doing is the feeling you get, then you don’t need the doing, right?”
"Fuck that.” Jill said, “It’s not the same and you know it.”
Braxus shrugged again and began carefully manipulating the controls for atmospheric descent. dipping into the very outer edge of the atmosphere. The air outside rumbled against the outer shell of the craft. They glanced briefly behind themselves and said, “Not necessarily sayin I disagree with you mind, just giving you the idea.”
“Anyway,” Braxus continued, “that tech by itself won’t get you Successful Terminal Hedonism. After all, if everyone on the planet is hooked up to a happiness machine, who is going to do all the work? Who produces food and fuel? Who takes care of sick people? Who maintains the machines and keeps the power running? Answer: AI and robots, which is actually the trickier tech to make. This is why another one of the Twelve Ends is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Unsuccessful Terminal Hedonism.”
Braxus’s fingers danced across a control pad and a screen next to where Jill was standing came to life. The screen showed a city, broken and dirty beyond anything Jill had ever seen. Scattered around the street were humanoid figures with two small eyestalks protruding from their heads, all of them unmoving and horribly emaciated, skin parched and drawn in. Almost all of them had some kind of device strapped to their waists, cables threading from the grey box on their waists to the base of their skulls, where the cables were burrowed into their flesh. No obvious injuries were on most of them. It looks like they had simply laid down and waited to die. The buildings nearby were burned out and smashed. Here and there was a different scene, scenes of conflict. The image on the screen changed and Jill saw one of the creatures with no device that appeared to be clutching the cables of one of the devices in their hand, as if they had ripped the cable off of another of their kind. This body had the back of it’s head caved in, as if hit with a rock.
“What the fuck am I looking at Braxus?” Jill asked, her face ashen in the glow of the viewscreen.
"You are looking at Relto-5, home of a sentient species called the frevs.” Braxus said. “An example of Unsuccessful Terminal Hedonism. See, if you develop the happiness tech, but a species fails to control its use, this is what you get. Imagine if, on your primitive planet, a drug appeared on the street that was functionally reusable, had little to no physical side-effects, and could make you feel better than you ever had before at the push of a button. Strek, you could even customize the things. A button for an orgasm, a button for feeling excitement, a button for tranquility, on and on. What do you think might happen?”
Jill didn’t want to think about it, but she could hardly deny the possibility: “Well, I suppose it’s possible that we’d be fucked as a species. I could imagine people buying one of these boxes and immediately giving up on everything. If the thing only took as much juice as a cellphone you’d just need a working outlet every day or so. Folks would stop going to work, stop seeing their friends, stop eating, stop doing anything.”
Braxus nodded, “You got it human. Relto-5 fell apart. Sure enough, a huge number of them refused to use the devices. Early on there was even an attack on the factory that made the tech. The company that made the tech just said that if the devices were used responsibly, in a limited fashion, they were fine to use.”
“Yeah, like anyone is going to use an automatic happiness button responsibly,” Jill muttered.
"Precisely, human,” Braxus said. “Anyway, ten years after the tech was introduced it all came to a head. Bit by bit the population had decided to try the tech. Most folks were suspicious at first, and plenty of folks only used the tech sparingly in the beginning. But that didn’t last long. More and more folks gave up on everything, stopped living. Society can hardly run if a third of all people are basically useless, can it? Not enough doctors and nurses, not enough teachers, not enough manufacturing, not enough farmers. Crime went through the roof as people who couldn’t afford the tech stole them or did what they had to to get one. The things broke from time to time, and you can’t imagine what a person would do to get that feeling back. Plenty of times cops broke into a house only the find the owner murdered, with the murderer sitting right next to the body, plugged in and smiling and motionless. They left them plugged in most of the time, easier than having them try to claw you apart in their effort to get hooked back up.”
The images on the screen kept changing, showing new scenes from the dead world. Jill didn’t want to see anymore fields of dead people, but she couldn’t look away.
“Finally,” Braxus said, “It all fell apart. Their governments crumbled as their leaders started hooking themselves up. The worse things got, the less food there was, the less medicine, the more tempting it was to hook yourself up. Within fifty years of the commercial release of the tech, every frev on the planet was dead. Unsuccessful Terminal Hedonism, yeah? Now, then, this planet on the other hand.”
Braxus killed the display of Relto-5 and gestured back at the dark planet on the main viewscreen.
”They pulled it off. Did it organized like. See that’s not really a dead planet, there are at least 10 billion sentients still alive down there I’d say. Having a hard time translating their language, and I don’t have much to go on. Here, listen.”
Braxus pushed a button and suddenly a noise issued from the bridge’s audio system. It took Jill a moment to recognize this as speech, the speaker took no pauses or breathes, but rather uttered an unbroken stream of syllables. Their voices were much higher pitched than a human.
”What’s it say?” she asked.
”Difficult to tell exactly”, Braxus replied, “But the gist is a message to any visitors. Their species appears to be called the sultoon. They’re asking to be left alone. Looks like they all plugged themselves in about….. 10,000 of your earth years ago.:
”Wait, the same people? All that time”, she interjected. “Yeah, looks like,” Braxus said, glancing again at the information on the screen, “Could be they have long natural lifespans, but my guess is tech again, artificially keeping them young, or keeping them alive long past when they’d otherwise die, which ain’t quite the same thing o’course. It was all planned, see, down to the last detail. They developed AI to run the machines, mine the mines, run the powerplants, and look after the sultoon. Then, on the same day, one big event, everyone reports to their designated area and they all get plugged in. Been there ever since. So long as they can keep getting power one way or another I reckon they’ll stay that way until their sun expands.”
The dread and wrongness Jill was feeling deepened into horror as she contemplated this. She was about to say something when the monitor beeped urgently.
“Oh, and a warning,” Braxus said, “looks like they’ve got autonomous defense systems in case anyone tries to fuck with them."
Braxus spun around a grin, gleam in their ebon eyes.
”Wanna go down and take a closer look, yeah?”
Jill stared at them for a moment, incredulous. “Didn’t you just say they had auto defenses?”
Braxus waved breezily, “Well yeah, but they aint nothing I can’t get through. Come on, it’ll be interestin.”
Jill nearly refused. She desperately didn’t want to see this planet close up. Everything about what she was faced with sat very wrong with her. She knew instinctively that if she saw those sentients down there, saw what they’d done to themselves, she’d never be able to get away from that image. But she’d feel like a coward if she didn’t see for herself. She nodded grimly, “Ok, lets do it. “
*********
Roughly an hour later the Opportunity landed in what resembled a city square. Scorch marks crisscrossed the hull where Braxus had been less than successful in dodging the planet’s surface-to-orbit lasers. Jill staggered out of the ship on wobbly legs and promptly threw up. Braxus followed behind moments later, apologetic.
”Ah shit, Jill, oh fuck, can I get you anything? What helps humans?”
In between retches Jill managed to speak, “What the fuck was that Brax? I hit the fucking ceiling of the fucking bridge when you rolled, why didn’t you tell me to strap in first?”
"I didn’t think it would be that bad, strek me, their tech is old as fuck. I figured the cloaker would do the trick, and the jammers if not that. Didn’t streking think I’d actually have to dodge shit.”
”Fuck.” - retch - “You.”
After a few minutes Jill was able to stand and take in her surroundings. It was dark, the only lights were from the ship. She removed a small flashlight from her jacket and clicked it on. In the circle of light she saw thick cables running alongside streets and up the sides of buildings. It was upsettingly quiet, and Jill couldn’t help but break the silence. “Well, we know what we’re really here to see, so let’s fucking see it.”
Braxus nodded. “Careful human, I’m mostly sure I shook their attention by the time I landed but we could be snert deep in killbots in ten minutes if we’re not quiet. The detonator flares probably fooled them into thinking we were vaporized, and I put us down far away enough from any life signals that I’m thinking they’re not looking where we are, but we gotta watch our step, yeah?”
Jill nodded and killed the flashlight. Braxus handed her low light goggles and slipped on a pair themself. She activated the goggles and suddenly it seemed as if a bright sun was shining down on the area. On the older architecture she could see decoration, color, aesthetics, but the more recent, relatively speaking, the structures, the more austere they became. Braxus and Jill made their way away from the ship, towards where Braxus detected life signs, stepping as quietly as they could. They remained entirely silent, gesturing when they needed to communicate. It didn’t take long for Braxus to point to a particular building, a black metallic rectangular cuboid. It took Braxus a moment to figure out how to open the door, being unfamiliar with sultoon tech and physiology, but eventually the door slid sideway, revealing a pitch black entryway.
The trexian and the human crept inside and glanced upwards. The entire building was one room, the size of what Jill would think of as a large warehouse. Packed in as tightly as they could fit were row upon row of glass pods, stacked one upon each other in a metal frame. Hiding as well as they could, Braxus and Jill watched small hovering robots, kept aloft by some kind of antigrav, float among the pods. All of them were engaged in some kind of work, different tools extending from their frames to make repairs and adjustments.
Jill tapped her goggles, zooming her vision in to get a better look at the inhabitants of the pods. When she finally got a clear look at them a sensation of awful numbness took her over.
The sultoon were quadrupedal, symmetrical in every direction from a top down view. Four legs supported a mostly cylindrical body, with four grasping appendages higher up. Jill couldn’t quite figure out what their sensory organs were. Even as alien as their forms were to her, she knew she wasn’t seeing them as they once had been. Their bodies were utterly atrophied, skin and muscles hanging loosely from their skeletal systems. They moved slightly in their pods, suspended in a bluish liquid. Cables and tubes ran into their bodies. Thousands of them, looking at nothing, making slight noises of what Jill took to be pleasure, or whatever their species’ equivalent was. Braxus whispered to Jill, their mouth right next to her ear.
”Yeah, alive way past their natural lifespans. Look closely at their bodies, see the incisions?”
Jill had to zoom her vision in even more to see them, but sure enough, each and every sultoon was crisscrossed with extremely thin healed wounds. As she scanned the rows of pods, she spotted where the cuts came from. In one of the pods, an opening appeared, revealing that the liquid was part of a connected series of tubes. Two small robots swam into the pod, towing a fleshy lump behind them. As Jill watched, the two robots extended grasping arms and small blades, and they began performing some kind of surgery on the sultoon. As they cut, the sultoon didn’t respond. In a matter of minutes, they had extracted some organ and replaced it with the lump they had brought with them, efficiently stitching the flesh together with barely a hint of any damage.
”See,” Braxus muttered, “all automated, all nice and efficient. Old organs go bad, replace them with new ones. Somewhere on this planet they got big old organ farms, guarantee.”
Jill felt like vomiting again. She suddenly couldn’t be in this place anymore. She swiftly turned to leave.
She moved too quickly, and her hand caught a piece of loose debris as she turned. With a shocking clang it fell against the floor.
”Fuck, run!” Braxus shouted.
The hovering robots spun as one and trained their sensors on the two interlopers, moving with frightening speed. Jill and Braxus sprinted towards the door. Lines of searing light leapt from the pursuing machines, cutting through metal and stone like it wasn’t there, barely missing the fleeing pair.
As they fled the formerly silent city erupted with buzzing menace, as long dormant bots sprang from their docking stations in response to the intruders. All attempt at stealth was left behind as Jill and Braxus haphazardly rushed towards the Opportunity, knocking discarded ancient machinery out of their way in their attempt to stay ahead of flying death.
A few heartbeats later they rounded a corner and saw the comforting sight of the ship.
”Silprey doth kairi!” Braxus shouted, the programmed command word for an emergency exit. The ship simultaneously opened the doors, began takeoff preparations, and activated its own autonomous slug launchers. A trio of sultoon bots appeared only to be perforated with three precise shots from the ship.
The sentients fled into the safety of the ship, Braxus immediately throwing themself into the pilot’s chair.
”Definitely strap in this time, ok?” they screamed over the sound of the the battle raging outside.
Not needing to be told twice, Jill sat in the co-pilots chair and began buckling herself in. She had barely gotten the last of the safety belts in place before her stomach dropped as the ship shot into the sky. The bots where left behind immediately, but Jill could guess what was about to happen next.
Violet lasers the width of telephone poles suddenly arced across the sky, seeking to cut the Opportunity out of the air. Braxus wrenched the controls and the ship spun into a maneuver that insulted physics. Almost every laser missed the hull by a few inches, save for one that blasted a scar across a more heavily armored section of the ship. A few ass clenching moments later, the Opportunity blasted out of the outer atmosphere and into the safety of empty space.
The crew of two remained perfectly silent for several minutes, Jill breathing heavily and Braxus allowing their oxygen membranes to do their work.
”Hey Braxus?” Jill said.
”Yeah Jill?”
”Don’t let me ever try that tech, ok?”
”I promise.”