I haven’t decided what I will do in my next life although the people who organise these things have been sending me reminders about it for the past two years. No-one can be in a life for more than 30 years—that has been the rule for a very long time, at least since the second Great Bang. Some of the reminders they send sound more like threats: ‘decide for yourself by the end of the month or we’ll decide for you.’ If that happens, their decision will probably involve getting me out of the way, making me an outposter.
I can choose one of the general life categories such as making, thinking, growing or helping, or one of their specific subcategories like growing vegetables or making furniture. I’d like to be a thinker, as that’s what I’m doing now, but few people get to do the same job two lives in a row.
I work as a helper to an LOP—that’s a Learner of the Past, whose job is to find out what life used to be like. He in turn reports to the Keeper of Essential Historical Knowledge (KEHK) who decides how much of this information to share with the rest of the world and how much to store as bundles of memoryfibre in some crypt.
I could, of course, choose a life as an outposter as my friend Indie wants to do. She says she’d rather go to jabiru and sit on a rock than spend another working life in a shoe factory. She says she deserves a rest after all the hard jobs she’s done.
‘You must be mad. It’s just a cop-out.’ What I really mean is that I’ll miss her. We’ve had fun together in this life.
‘I can do useful things like making baskets out of reeds or helping people should I happen to see any. How could you call it a cop-out?’
‘You’ll be lonely,’ I say.
‘But I’ll be safe. Not like Mex. One minute he’s working as a helper at BOOM, next minute he’s blown to bits by a few wires that suddenly turn themselves into a bomb.’
Mex was a fun guy when he was in one piece and I am angry that no-one at BOOM (the Business of Offshore and Onshore Mines) seems to know how it happened, or if they do they’re not telling people like us. I’d like to know what he’s been