Free Luminarium by Alex Shakar

which every basic human need will be met. In techie circles, bodily immortality itself isn’t thought to be out of the question, even in their own lifetimes. There’s talk of minds uploaded to storage banks, spare bodies hanging like so many suits in a closet. No shortage of resources, no enslavement to the dictates of the body, violence itself a vestigial act without meaning or consequence. Along what new lines will such a culture organize itself? This question, George is saying, is what will make their virtual world at once a recreational activity and something else, an edutainment, a training ground for the next inevitable phase of human evolution, for the postmaterial lives they’ll soon be living for real.
    “Urth.” George spells out the word, raises his glass. “Say it with me.”
    Fred and Sam exchange a glance, the enormity of what George is offering them—rescue from their stalled little lives—beginning to break through their furtive reserve. In a minute, Fred will be saying it with him, and Sam will too. Before much longer, they’ll be saying it again in a boardroom full of suits and a staggering view of, among the thousands of other buildings sprawled below, the little brown box that will soon house their sunny, lofty office. And, poof, George and Fred will be co-CEOs, Sam a CTO. And Fred will find himself giving in to life, blossoming in a way he’d given up hoping was possible. The dreaded pursuit of success, he’ll find, is only a problem for those still clamoring at the gates. For those who’ve made it in, who are exactly where they want to be, there’s no war, no work—just magic.
    But that future is still a few seconds off. For now, he lets George squirm—pint glass hovering in the air, smile getting nervous at the edges—and savors the obvious: George needs him, too.
    When Fred finally relents and raises his glass, George cuts him off:
    “You’re not going to smoke in the office, are you?”
    As it will happen, he’ll kick cigarettes within weeks. Though his response for now: what will seem in memory a never-ending smoke plume, blown in his twin brother’s face.

Sam was right where Fred had last seen him a week ago: crosslegged in his Aeron chair, back hunched, head jutted, headset in place, black T-shirt rolled at the cuffs and tucked neatly into his black jeans. Closecropped hair, patchy shadow of a beard. The unvarying nature of Sam’s appearance wasn’t a matter of personal inattention, but of decisiveness—the whole fashion question, in his view, had been settled—and, as well, probably, a deep need for constancy. He ordered identical backups of those black jeans and black T-shirts online and sent them out to be laundered on a rotating basis. He electrically trimmed his hair down to three-eighths of an inch every few weeks, and his beard to one-eighth every morning. Several times a day, of late, to renew his energy, he’d drop to the floor and do twenty pushups, with the result that sinewy muscle squadrons had begun taking up positions on the ridgelines of his otherwise skinny arms and chest. For someone who sat in a chair twelve or more hours a day, he probably wasn’t in the worst possible shape. Though Fred wouldn’t have called it health, exactly. Sam’s eyes were too deeply ringed.
    He was leaned into his dual-screen display as Fred approached, the left one crammed with microscopic lines of code, the right a window into the Urth environment—what appeared to be the hostage-extraction scenario. Sam’s avatar, dressed in desert fatigues and holding an M-16A2 rifle with a grenade-launcher attachment, stood against a wall to one side of a gateway leading out of a barren, moonlit courtyard. Another soldier, identifiable from his girth and sparse blond beard as their lead programmer Jesse’s avatar, stood to the other side, firing out into the street with a mammoth M-60E3, the jackhammer report of which rattled from Sam’s headset. Out of ingrained habit, Sam joggled the