I just finished assembling 2,765 words of prose, over the last couple of hours. I've spent the last few days thinking about various details of the latest variant of the character/fursona in my gallery, it's all first-draft stuff, and it's more science-fiction background first-person narrative infodump than anything particularly furry... but it's 2,765 more words of prose than I've written in quite some time.
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"Here's a question for you - would you rather be an unskilled immigrant, or dead?
"Unhappily, based on the actions of nearly everyone I met during my first life, just about everyone from my native culture chose 'dead'. Which is why I chose to sign up for cryo, based on my best guess that it would give me a five percent chance of waking up as the future equivalent of an unskilled immigrant, instead of a one-hundred percent chance of staying permanently dead if I hadn't signed on the dotted line. As is obvious, I succeeded at that one-in-twenty chance, so here I am, while nearly everyone else from back then isn't.
"Yes, I'm getting therapy. Lots and lots of therapy."
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"Employment, whoo. Insulo Tri - the O'Neill Cylinder station here in L4 - has specific job requirements in order to get a work visa for permanent residence, and doing all the scrimping and saving I can, the best budget I've been able to put together still needs €1200 per month. I am /extremely/ uneducated and unskilled by modern standards, which places severe limits on what anyone's willing to hire me for. Fortunately, one of the visa-qualifying jobs is 'Interactive Video Scripter', the current hybrid descendant of movies and video games, for which I can be my own boss, and for which my having written most of a couple of prose novels lets me squeak through the technical qualifications; and while I'm not particularly good or popular, the current versions of Patreon let me pick up around €360 per month. Far from enough to live on, but enough to get my foot in the door. I have to put in three and a half, maybe four hours a day on it to keep my subscribers happy, which leaves lots of time to hustle up more paying work.
"Unfortunately, until I can train myself up, most of the other jobs I can get only pay around €400 a month. Even working my tail off with three jobs, working for eleven hours a day seven days a week, that still falls short of my best-possible budget. However, I have found two options that let me get over the hump.
"Being a piece of software, and with my digital brain having enough silicon to run my mind at up to ten times realtime speeds, I am also able to cheat, to a certain degree. While I can't move my body any faster, I can get eight hours of sleep in forty-eight minutes. To keep my mental circadian rhythm from drifting too far from all the bio-sapients around me, right now, I speed myself up to ten times mental speed for two hours forty minutes per day, objective time, giving me twenty-one hours twenty minutes per day at realtime speed, giving me forty-eight hours subjective for every twenty-four objective. I take one sleep period in fast-time, and do my writing there, too. But there are only so many things I can do to get paid while thinking too fast for real socialization with almost everyone else stuck at realtime.
"Other than that cheat, I've come across just one option that's enough to cover the gap: renting out my womb, and acting as a surrogate mother, for €660 a month. It sounds like I just have to wait and let myself get bulkier, but the contracts actually involve a lot of tracking of my activity, ensuring I do the right sorts of exercise, diet, keeping my mood from drifting too far from the optimal hormonal balance, and all sorts of other inconveniences.
"So writing, being pregnant, and one other job is enough to keep me going month to month. Right now, my third job is being part of an AI rights activist collective, only partly since I'm technically an AI myself. Donations are highly variable, though; I'm looking into swapping that into something more steady, like using augmented-reality overlays to let my body act as something almost, but not quite, like a living remote-controlled drone.
"If I had a better background, had lived for decades knowing that various algorithms were tracking me in all sorts of ways, and had optimized my behaviour to increase my trust metrics, I'd be able to get paid a lot more for a lot less effort. I I were purely digital, my costs would drop down to just renting server space, though there are a /lot/ of other software people who've already worked hard at finding every possible niche that a purely software person can exploit. If the revival trust that had paid for my mind to be uploaded and a new body constructed for me, within certain parameters, hadn't let me choose my preferred physical sex, my current best-paying hustle would be ruled out.
"So, my weekly timesheet is... weird. For every objective week, I experience 336 hours, of which 112 of them are spent asleep, and 75 are dedicated to my gigs, leaving me 149 hours per week for study, recreation, socializing, and whatever else I feel like. If I were to spend eight subjective hours a day, 112 hours per objective week, on studies, it would take me around 18 objective weeks to get through all the remedial classes that would just bring me up to par with modern-day high-school graduates. And, as best as I could estimate, it would take a similar amount of time to raise my trust-metrics enough to, roughly, where I'd be able to rake in two, maybe two and a half times what I am now. At that point, I'd finally be able to afford and qualify for some serious modern education. I mean, I live in /space/, and how could I not want to go further into the black than this station, which, while impressive, is still mostly a few square miles of imitating Earth? Once I've gone through the standard 38ish weeks and given birth to the sproglet, I'm thinking of going for a spacer's license, and then one or more of host-services license, ship operation's license, and piloting license, maybe some degree of paramedic... maybe try being a microgravity worker, or farhauler pilot.
"Of course, that's all assuming that everything goes well, and nothing comes out of left field to derail such plans. That's why it's a good idea to have general goals, and to arrange your plans so that each little part advances you towards at least one goal all on its own, so that no matter what happens, you're still making progress. I mean, maybe I'll meet someone I like enough to want a relationship with, and spending time with them will make all my first guesses about scheduling my education completely pointless. Or something medical will go wrong with the pregnancy, or I'll cross a line while protesting and get arrested, or I'll offend modern sensibilities with my writing so much that I lose my work-visa ticket and have to leave the station. But I can make guesses about lots of those, and make plans for just-in-case so I'm not caught flat-footed. And modern social safety nets are comprehensive enough that any medical needs I, er, need are covered; getting enmeshed in the local justice system is more about surveillance and rehabilitation than punishment; and even if I'm deported to somewhere with a lower standard of living, the cost-of-living will also drop far enough I'll still be able to keep my head above water. Even in a worst-case scenario, where my digital brain gets scrapped, I've got backups of my mindstate in three separate offsite locations, so I'd only suffer amnesia of whatever I did since I mailed off my latest mindstate.
"All-in-all, my life is a frantic mess, there's all sorts of things about the modern world I'm completely in the dark about ranging from fundamental physics to the latest in-jokes, I'm too poor to afford all sorts of modern conveniences and luxuries, I have to swallow my pride and put up with all sorts of embarrassing invasions of what I consider my private life, and I'm barely keeping my bank account from getting smaller... but I have enough leeway to, at least on occasion, just relax and play; and I expect things to, gradually, get better. And, presumably with the occasional interruption, keep on getting better. Some future version, or versions, of me could still me kicking around in a hundred years, a thousand, ten thousand, or more.
"Put another way, I made it past the hump of the worst life's likely to throw at me, and the future's looking better.
"Put yet another way, before I died, I didn't believe anything like 'heaven' existed. But I'm happy to consider being able to cover my debts and having educational opportunities to improve myself as close enough an approximation."
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"Hooboy. Let me try to sum up. Doing a lot of exploring of the wide world and net for breadth, and with deep-dives here and there on particular subjects that catch my fancy, I think I've identified an opportunity I might be able to take better advantage of than most... but I haven't decided if trying to is going to be worth the risk and effort.
"Put simply, I've found a weird, old spaceship in a junkyard that nobody's using, and I think I could not only afford to buy it, but make a profit with it.
"Its frame is a standard, forty-foot cargo container. It's a bit large to use as a workpod, too small to use as an OTV - sorry, orbital transfer vehicle - its fuel is too expensive for regular runs as an interstation transport pod, its thrust too small to land anywhere much bigger than Ceres, and it has nowhere near enough cargo space to make a profit running interplanetary cargo, and nowhere near enough radiation shielding to carry VIPs very far. It was originally built as a space ambulance; it's got enough cargo space to carry a surgical theatre and some robodocs, enough thrust to make orbital changes in a reasonably small time, and enough delta-v to travel all throughout Earth-Luna orbital space, and then some. Heck, it's so overpowered with delta-v that you could load it with supplies, point it at Pluto, and rendezvous in five years. Assuming you didn't mind picking up around 250 rads from cosmic rays during the trip.
"My thoroughly-improved body has enough tricks up its sleeve to actually handle that level of radiation... but that's not what I'm considering using it for. I've been running numbers, and if I get a good deal on it because it's been used, if I arrange to get another few certifications to qualify for some government subsidies, and if I get a bank loan and mortgage that I'll be paying off for the next twelve years, then I can just about afford to buy the ship, get it into working order, and fit it out for use. If I add up my monthly starving-student-lifestyle living expenses, the mortgage payments, the subsidies, insurance, union dues, docking fees, taxes, then I'd be spending €7,313 per month, plus fuel. Fuel for this thing is nine meters-per-second delta-v per €1.
"Based on the trust metrics about myself that I've managed to optimize, and on other people who've worked in similar fields, if I were to use that ship to go out and salvage defunct satellites, clear up orbital debris, let myself be hired for in-place repairs of satellites /before/ they become defunct, and pick up the occasional charter, then I could expect to make an average of €10,000 per month. Plus, once the mortgage is paid off, I'd own the ship free and clear, and my expenses would drop to €5,561 per month, plus fuel. It's about 2,970 meters-per-second to get from L4 to the graveyard orbit near GEO, or about €660 per round trip, plus maneuvering; my projected budget covers about four such trips per month, during the mortgage payments, six afterwards. More, if I spend more time around GEO and LEO instead of heading back to L4 each time. Or equivalent trips elsewhere, depending on where the best junk is to be found.
"The term for this profession is, unfortunately, 'vacuum cleaner'.
"The financial numbers... work out. Well enough, anyway. Probably. I've got a business plan showing the evidence that I'd at least break even most of the time, and do better often enough to almost certainly cover lean months. And if the lean times last too long, worst case is that as an independent business owner, I'd have to file for corporate bankruptcy and the bank would reposess the ship and all the other business assets - so the bank would be happy either way. I'd be back to starting from scratch - that is, just about where I am now - plus a few more years of experience to add to my résumé. And in the meantime, and if-and-when I manage to pay off the mortgate... I'd be living the life of just about every space-fangirl's dream. Oh, sure, I wouldn't be any Han Solo or Harry Mudd or Malcolm Reynolds, but I'd be my own boss, with my own ship, able to travel anywhere in Earth-Luna space I saw fit. Sure, I'd be spending most of my time inside the tiny cabin and cockpit of a space-Mack-truck, or in a spacesuit, but I'd be /in space/, not just spinning through the days in a piece of imitation-Earth. Heck, don't tell the banks that I've even thought of this, but if there was something important enough for me to be willing to tank all my trust-metrics and suffer the consequences of piloting a ship the bank claimed was its, I could get to anywhere in the Solar System in about as much of a hurry as any ship-class you care to name. Or, you know, without defaulting on the payments, if someone felt it was important enough to cover my expenses over the 4 months it would take to reach the asteroid belt, do whatever was worth doing there, and the 4 months to come back... or wherever else might be worth going.
"This plan is something I /can/ do, it's something I /want/ to do... I'm just not sure yet if it's something I /should/ do. By the time I'd be ready to tackle being an independent vacuum cleaner, I'd be just about ready to serve as an engineer for somebody else's business, making, oh, €13,000 per month, steady, and without anywhere near the expenses of running the Pumpkin. ... That's the former-ambulance's name, if I didn't mention. Going that way, I could switch from the starving-student lifestyle to a pretty decent modern life, with more luxuries than I could shake my tail at; or instead of going sybaritic, I could work on accumulating €140,000 per year for whatever else I thought was important, such as donating to an anti-existential-risk charity. Even if I decided to be completely selfish, only interested in preserving my own mind and values into the long-term future, it's not obvious whether I'd be better served by slightly reducing the odds of the Earth getting wiped out by grey goo or an unfriendly super-intelligent AI through such donations, or having a ship to be able to skedaddle away from any planet that looks like it's in trouble, or some other course entirely, like focusing on getting around the local biosapients' culture that's kind of squeamish about uploaded minds having more than one active copy running at a time. And that doesn't include the minor paradox that selfishly working for my values includes the value that I'm not completely selfish.
"All of which adds to me being in the entirely enviable position of having to decide not just what I want and can get, but what I want /most/ out of all the things I can work towards accomplishing - and then acting on that decision, and working towards it. Fortunately, modern science and engineering have come up with a few new tricks to help measure how strong someone's wants are, and how those wants are likely to change; so the next thing I'm going to be doing is running all sorts of analyses of my mindstate program, and getting quantifiable numbers of my desire-strengths - and their Bayesian-likelihood projections through various Monte Carlo simulations of various scenarios - to use to make my subsequent plans. I've got a small futures-prediction market set up to pay out based on what the results turn out to be; so, do you think you know me well enough to place some bets?"
