Hustling Through the Dark
Chapter One
by DataPacRat
Hustling Through the Dark
By DataPacRat
Vlog #1
"Is this thing on? Okay, good.
"Hello, world. My new advertising manager says that vlogging is charmingly nostalgic, and that it works well with my general out-of-touch-ness in a way that's likely to improve our metrics, so here I am.
"You can call me Dee. You can call me anything you want to, really, but I'm most likely to respond to that. I'm getting ready to go on a year-long solo trip, which has somehow turned into a whole Thing beyond my original modest plans. I was just going to salvage some defunct hardware at the Seventy Ophiuchi gravitational-lens relay, which should have provided a somewhat better return than I'd get through my usual local-space work; but now apparently I'm in some sort of race? When I found out someone else had heard enough of my plan to figure it out, and were getting ready to try to get there ahead of me, I went over to have a chat to see if there was some amicable way for us to cooperate and split the profits, instead of each of us trying to keep the other from getting any return at all. But that meeting leaked, and then complicated stuff happened that I'm still trying to figure out, and now Francesca - that's my ad agent - says that we're going to at least cover our nut just by competing, and if I actually win, so much the better.
"Part of the whole process is to try to solicit crowdfunding, so, er, please subscribe and donate?
"I'm supposed to tell you as much about myself as I feel comfortable with, to entice both the potential donors who sympathize and identify enough with me to join in, and those who find me freakishly foreign and alien and want to watch ironically, or hate-watch me, or the like. I personally don't really want to encourage the latter, but Francesca is of the opinion that a subscription's a subscription, and I didn't hire her to ignore her expertise and advice. We're still getting a feel for each other, but she's got a good sense of my boundaries already, so I think it'll work out.
"So. As you can see, I'm a member of the 'furry' affinity group, with a preference for rodents. If you're just listening to the audio or reading the transcript, that means that I'm a person whose body has been altered to have a lot of animalistic features, including a rat-like head, fur, and paws. You'll also notice that I'm not a purist to the theme, given I've also got feathery wings and a snake for a tail. I'm not particularly complicated; I like flying, and having an extra pair of eyes is more than worth the trouble it took to get them.
"A detail of my lifestyle that seems to surprise everyone I meet even more than my appearance is how straight-laced I am. I don't do anything related to tulpamancy, mask-living, or any of the related terms involving having more than one personality or perspective in my head. The only individual running inside my skull is me - and, if you want to count it, Cee, my nonsapient AI secretary-slash-psychotherapist. I find the current era's predilection with such exercises both confusing and apparently pointless, which I suppose confirms my status as an old fogey. I suppose I'd call myself a greymuzzle, if I hadn't already gone for albino-labrat white fur. I've been living in this era for almost six years now, so I've had plenty of exposure to people extolling the virtues of all sorts of variants of the idea, and if I haven't been convinced yet, I don't expect to be. I'm quite satisfied being just me. Oh, and since it usually also creeps into such conversations, I also don't drink, smoke, or use recreational drugs. I do occasionally use caffeine, or its equivalent, when I'm in the middle of a work-binge that I think it's worth staying up late for, but I'm not habituated to it. I also don't use any of the software versions of the same.
"Sorry, I meant to mention earlier - I'm a revival, a software emulation of my original biological brain. There's a computer inside my skull - er, skulls, including my tail's snakey head - that my mind runs on. I also have no interest in joining any of the fast-time virtual realms that so many other software people seem to prefer. As one authour once put it, I like always knowing where my off-switch is, and having control over it. So I chose to stick with living in biological society.
"Hm, let's see... I was born in the late twentieth century, died in the early twenty-first, and made arrangements to be cryopreserved. I wasn't rich, and wasn't able to sock anything away in a trust fund to pay for my revival; so to increase the odds I'd make it back, I volunteered to be an experimental subject, given certain preconditions, like the tech working on chimpanzees. So they tried dicing my brain and scanning it before almost anyone else was brought back, but apparently there were some issues, and they weren't able to actually bring me-the-person back into existence. But the data was useful; I'm told that some scans of a few tiny bits of my brain were used as the basis for some fundamental pieces of software that are used by almost every revival. And they kept plenty of backups of the scans. Six years ago, there was a nice confluence, in that there was both a breakthrough in algorithmic techniques and the uncovery of a trove of data from my original lifetime useful for reconstruction... and those were enough to apply to my brain-scans to create a software version of me with sufficient fidelity to the original. So, here I am; or, rather, there I was.
"Fortunately for me, while I was dead, you folk managed to get your political act together enough that I had a Basic Guaranteed Income available to cover my living expenses; and there were enough other revivals around to help cover the unusual expenses that our kind of person finds ourselves faced with. So after, hm, what was it, about nine months or so, I was able to afford to get myself a body made. For legal reasons that I'm in no way competent to explain in detail, it had to start out as a clone of my original body, but I was able to pay for a few enhancements. Not the wings or tail - I bought those upgrades later - but a change to my preferred gender, the decorative furry features, plus a few deeper ones that aren't so visible. For example, there's a bottle of compressed oxygen below my left lung, there's some reinforcement under my skin, and I have nictitating membranes and sealable orifices; I'm fully vacuum-rated for three hours, without needing any sort of suit. I still wear a vacc-suit whenever I'm working, but it's nice to know if something bad happens to a ship I'm in, I can take the time to deal with emergency procedures properly, instead of hurrying so fast I do something wrong that makes things worse. I've also got an enhanced sensorium; I can see a wider range of colours, I can echolocate, and a few things like that. A good portion of the nine-month period I spent in virtual space was me getting my mind used to such things, without resorting to crude direct mental editing.
"Once I was comfortably myself, able to walk around without needing a body that wasn't really one I wanted to live in, I enrolled in school. I went for a two-year certificate program; which, with modern pedagogical techniques, is at least equivalent to a four-year post-secondary program from my time. Oh, that's also when I immigrated up here to Insulo Tri - I actually had my body grown and assembled here. I was filling a lot of my dreams at once; living in orbit, having a female body, having a body I didn't dislike, being able to afford tuition without taking out ruinous loans... I hate to say 'back in my day'... okay, that's not true, I've been saying it often enough I almost certainly do it because I get a kick out of it. But back in my day, none of those could be taken as a given, and few people these days think about what a luxury they are. My therapist says that some of my habits are still based on me not trusting that they're going to be guaranteed, but since those habits aren't maladaptive and I don't mind them, there's no harm in them.
"So, after graduating and getting my first set of certifications, I went on to the next stage of my long-term plan; moving from just living and learning in space, to working in it. I found employment in various places - orbital transfer vehicles, lunar landers, Earth-to-orbit craft, anything that gave me experience on actual spacecraft, and counted as time-served for the upgrades to my certifications as a mate. Took me three years until I qualified as being a captain instead of an officer or crew. I know the timing there's wonky, given how much trust has to be put in someone running even the tiniest ship with a horizon drive; but since I lived most of my life long before the levels of surveillance and sousveillance you've got now became commonplace, and I've got a digital brain that can be poked and prodded at if I give permission, I ended up in a weird corner of the trust-metric algorithms. My worst-case predictions aren't any worse than any other captain's, and my average-case metrics are slightly above average, so here I am.
"I'm going to save my work-life for the next vlog, so I think that covers just about everything... Francesca, are we taking any questions? We are? Okay, hit me.
"Of course, we have to get that one out of the way first. No, just because I spent a lot of time amongst furries doesn't mean I participate in a lot of orgies. I consider my sex life to be a private matter, and have no intention of discussing any details about it. If it makes any difference, I also spend a lot of time amongst members of the 'cyborg' affinity group, and that's not really the first topic most people want to ask them, is it?
"Ah! Something more sensible. You're right, my wings aren't nearly large enough to take off with, in Earth-normal gravity and air-pressure. Fortunately, Insulo Tri is a cylinder hab, and close to either cylinder's axis, the effective gravity is more than low enough to let me flap around; and I'm just capable of gliding down to a landing without breaking anything important, as long as I'm careful.
"Hm, this one's a little complicated. Mostly, I treat my tail as a limb, and route its senses to my main brain. But that's not the only thing I do with it. Because of the laws that sprang out of the em-pocalypse, I'm not allowed to have more than one copy of my mind running at a time; but I'm completely allowed to keep a continually-updated backup copy of my mindstate stored in my tail's computer. It's treated the same as keeping a backup copy on a computer at home, or a storage server on another planet, or anywhere else. And if something does happen to my main body's brain-computer, my snake-tail's brain-computer can take over running things. There's still just the one of me, but I'm as close to being bi-located as it's legal to be. All that being said - it's also possible for other digital people to be housed in my snake-tail. Sometimes I move Cee, my AI, into control of it, if I need the extra perspective or focus. Not too many others are interested in being a limbless body attached to someone else's rear end, and of those, even fewer are individuals I want to have control of even that much of my body. I have tried it, and without violating any confidences, I can say that everyone involved decided it shouldn't be made into a permanent lifestyle choice.
"Yes, I do more exercise than flying. I do bodyweight exercises, I run, I swim, I fence singlestick... and I see a sudden bunch of questions from that. When I found out that the Olympics brought back singlestick fencing in twenty-one oh-four, I was curious, and tried out a few lessons, then just kept it up. Due to all the tweaks to my body, I'm disqualified from most official competitions; and even if I were allowed, I'm sufficiently terrible that I wouldn't qualify to attend anyway. But it's fun, and the benefits more than outweigh the costs.
"No, I don't make enough to afford my own apartment. Or, if you prefer, I technically do, but salvage rates are inconsistent enough that I don't make enough to reliably keep up rent and loan payments. I currently have one roommate, who gave me permission to mention her. She goes by Sparks, and is easy to recognize as the only turquoise-dyed camel-based furry in the area. She takes commissions for custom nonhuman clothing; if you've got a nonstandard set of limbs, feel free to get in touch with her. Yes, that plug was why she gave me permission.
"Ah, I see somebody's been googling me. Yes, I've been in more than one court case since I died. There were a few hearings shortly after my successful revival, mostly to double-check that I was really me. After that, the first one was, hm, that would've been my third day of classes, when another student, who was under the impression that having fur meant I was subhuman and an acceptable sexual target, assaulted me. Oh, Francesca just let me know she wants to roll a clip."
"Feel free to file charges; I already have. In case you weren't paying attention, when I said 'strike one', I started forwarding video to your parents. When I said 'strike two', I started forwarding to the school's administration and your fraternity's honour court. When you grabbed me - by the way, my medical AI says that I'm going to bruise - I called the cops while I defended myself. Before you try standing back up, you might want to call your family lawyer. Oh, and for your information, I only consider an apology to be acceptable if it includes an acknowledgement that you did something wrong, identifies what that wrong thing was, describes how you're going to try to make up the harm you did, and mentions what you're going to change about your life to keep from doing the wrong thing again in the future."
"So, yeah, that was an unpleasant moment. You can find the video of the full incident, including his swearing at me both before and after I knocked him onto his butt, if you look, but I don't feel any urge to spread that kind of language. I'm not completely happy with the actions I made, and since then I've tried to work out alternatives I could have chosen that didn't involve him causing further harm to me, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty. But I keep coming back to the thought that if that's how he chose to treat me, how might he treat other people, who might have taken fewer self-defense classes? I honestly don't know what he was thinking; maybe I was the first heavily-modified person he'd met, so he didn't care what he was videoed doing to me? I never did get an apology from him; the last I heard, he'd moved to Luna. Tycho, I think, but I didn't bother making a note.
"Other than that, mostly my legal troubles haven't been mine, but me getting caught up in my employers'. Trying to slide through inspections, skirting labour laws, even a trademark dispute. I did my best to try to stick within both the letter and spirit of whatever laws applied - and apparently I did well enough at that for my trust-metrics to let me get my captaincy pretty quickly.
"What's next... no, my limbs don't come off. My arms and legs are made of the same squishy meat as my torso. Why would anyone even ask that?
"Okay... Well, I'll get more into that next vlog, but in short, it turns out I'm terrible at marketing myself. I maintain a web one-point-oh personal website with associated email, I keep up with whatever comm methods my job demands, and Francesca is completely revamping my online business presence.
"I think that's a good-sized video for today; be sure to come back next time, when I'll introduce you to Pumpkin."
