Digital Echoes: Navigating Future Health

Log Entry #1 - April 23rd, 2072

They called it Terra Nova.

Of course, they named it full of optimism and hope. Why wouldn’t they? On the surface, it had seemed like a revolutionary concept.

Where do I even start? How do I begin to explain this one to you, Jim? I know you’ve been off-planet for a long time with the mining corps. I hope you've settled back into Earth life. I guess… I’ll start at the beginning. If you read this… you’ll understand.

Back when I lived on Earth years ago, mortality was at the forefront of medical science. By the 2030s, we’d cured most major illnesses, as well you know. Revolutionary cancer treatments, nanotechnology that could find and destroy diseased cells - it was a medical renaissance. So it made sense for the great minds of our time to turn their attention to prolonging the lifespan of humanity.

That’s what it boiled down to at the end of the day. We were terrified of death. No one could understand it; no one could fathom it. It spawned philosophical ideologies; blind faith… death was the one concept for which we had no answer.

 It was fear that drove the project forward. Greedy capitalists sat in their ivory towers that felt the cold fingers of death on their shoulders… they threw billions into Terra Nova, with the stipulation they could eke out another 50, 60 years if the project was successful.

In 2043, they announced Terra Nova to the general public.

The project was built to be the ultimate way to sustain human life. Scientists heralded it as the greatest experiment of the last two decades. Not since the great cancer breakthrough of 2024 had medical science seen such progress.

Terra Nova, funded by the benevolent E-Corp and various donors, was a colony that would launch into space in 2045. It was a test to see if humanity could increase its lifespan by using cutting-edge digital technology to project the natural life of a person.

As the company themselves told the world, every night, a digital avatar would live your life from the present day to death. Whatever your predicted lifespan was, the twin would live it, and the data they collected - information about health conditions, potential causes of death, pioneering new medical tools - all of it would be used to pre-empt the problems and extend the lifespan of a person to 120 years.

Sounds crazy, right? I was one of many who openly scoffed at the idea. It sounded like futuristic mumbo-jumbo made up by crackpot scientists with nothing better to do. But the rich and the fearful? They jumped on it. Especially when the announcement told everybody that if you intervened and made positive lifestyle changes based on your data, you’d be rewarded financially.

The prospect that turned many heads was the idea that if you devoted your life to looking after your body and mind, you’d never have to work again. As you can imagine, that drew a lot of interest.

Terra Nova was the beginning of change, they said. It was the start of extending the human lifespan, making it so that everyone would live past a century. Interest in the project grew massively over time. There was, of course, a list of criteria for entry.

There was a minimum life expectancy set at 75 for all who wanted a place on Terra Nova. Exemptions were given based on professions - doctors and teachers got in at 65, millionaires at 60, billionaires at 50. That last part always makes me chuckle. Nothing like money, eh?

It was 2045 when Terra Nova finally came online and opened the doors. All across the world, people heralded the start of the new age. I’m pretty sure I got drunk with some friends. But hey, don’t judge me, alright?

The station itself was an ugly behemoth. It was built to be very functional, practical, and it resembled a small moon in scale. There were thousands of people living up there - a news report in 2055 said at least 20,000 people had moved in. Terra Nova had a capacity for 80,000 all in. It seems kinda small for a colony, but hey, it was cutting-edge technology.

New people arrive in the colony every year. They’re constantly adding new areas and habitat parks too.

Me? I arrived on Terra Nova two years ago. It’s 2072 right now, and I’m getting on for 60. Not that you’d know it, mind. As lifespans have naturally increased, we’re all aging a little slower. I look about 40, 45 at best. It’s probably down to all the cutting-edge medicine down below. Nothing cures getting old like cellular regeneration.

Why am I telling you this story? I’ll tell you why. They came into my home this morning. The government. They’ve goddamn ransacked the place. Every single knife in the house is missing. Gone, just like that.

I mean, what the hell? All the security officers had to tell me was that it was “colony business”, and that “the medical representative would be along soon”. So I sat in the early dawn and waited for someone to explain to me what was going on.

Eventually, of course, they did. Some therapist-looking old guy with a thick bushy moustache. He sat me down and explained to me what had happened. He told me why they’d taken all the knives.

I’m scared, Jim. By the time this letter reaches you, I don’t know what the hell I’ll be doing. The things they told me… they’ve changed my entire outlook on life. Sal is upstairs, asleep still. I haven’t woken her yet. I didn’t want to burden her with what happened. I can’t bring myself to look her in the eyes, either.

Something happened to my avatar in the simulations last night. Now… Now I’m trapped in a nightmare situation. 10 years from now in the simulations… Sal leaves me. Our marriage breaks down, and she leaves me for another man.

Ten years from now, I will die.

Ten years from now, my avatar committed suicide.

Log Entry #2 - April 23rd, 2072

It’s been three hours since the medical representative left my home. For three hours, I’ve been sitting, locked in a prison inside my head.

Suicide? Me? It sounds impossible. But the more I think about it, the more realistic it becomes. I’ve seen the warning signs recently. My mood has been low all the time. I’ve told myself that it’s nothing, that I’m just in a rough patch, but I realise now. The thing that I have been grappling with, the unidentifiable cloud that seems to have been hanging over me for so many weeks now, it’s the beginning of a downward spiral. Well, at least that’s what they told me.

However, I should probably begin to tell the story from the beginning. If I’m going to understand how this happened, then I should probably retrace my steps and work out how I got here.

I know you have been off-planet for quite some time with the mining corps, so I’ll try and explain this as best I can.

As you remember, I met Sal in 2063. I was young then, full of enthusiasm and inspiration. My work as a teacher was fulfilling, but it wasn’t enough. Do you remember how we used to talk about life outside of work? Well, I haven’t found it by that point. I know you did, and your wedding was a beautiful moment, but I had yet to experience that.

It was 2063 when that changed. You had just left for Mars the year before, and radio communication between us hadn’t been great. It’s not your fault; I know how the technology is on those old transport ships. It’s pretty trash, so don’t worry too much about that. But, I remember when I met my wife.

It was the first day of a new school year. She was a brand-new teacher who had just started. She was even in the same department as me, teaching history. God, you should’ve seen her back then. She was beautiful, genuinely stunning. I was smitten, and I really had it bad. It took me weeks to pluck up the courage to talk to her in any kind of social setting, and it turns out that while she’d been just as interested in me as I had been in her.

For the first couple of years, it was like a dream. She was unique, beautiful, and my intellectual equal. We fell in love, and we married after five years, but then things began to go wrong. The marriage hit a bumpy patch, and I began to wonder if we’d made some kind of mistake.

However, the answer seemed to come in the form of Terra Nova. This amazing colony was taking its brand-new crop of colonists for 2070, and Sal signed us up without thinking much would come of it. Imagine the shock we got when the colony authorised our transfer and set us up with a brand new home.

On the surface, it seemed like such a good idea, you know? This was our chance to make things right again. We could get away from the pressures of work, the trappings of society and focus on our marriage. It would be our chance to rekindle and to get together and make things like they used to be. I was desperate, Jim. I love her, and I wanted it to work, so I agreed.

I still remember seeing the colony from the transport ship for the first time with my own eyes. It looked so… hopeful, suspended up there in a beautiful shimmer: ugly structure, mind. You can really see the space capitalism aesthetic shine through with Terra Nova. It wasn’t like the futuristic colonies of old TV. Not at all.

Imagine a series of bolted together landmasses in a vaguely spherical structure. Everything was all harsh edges, sharp lines, and obvious signs of work. It was built to be functional first, which isn’t massively surprising as such. There were millions of dollars worth of cutting-edge technology and medical equipment on the colony, so I guess aesthetics weren’t the main focus.

As we approached the massive shape in space, I felt this overwhelming surge of optimism. Maybe, just maybe, things would be okay. Maybe I’d make sure that we fixed the problems we’d been having. Maybe I’d live to be an old man, just like the colony promised. Maybe I’d manage to overcome my demons, to battle through what had been going on.

They showed us immediately to the home we’d be living in. It was a nice place. It was a typical one-bedroom place, but there was a room dedicated to gym equipment in there, which was nice. You could tell that this need to be fit and healthy was clearly the focal point of life. All the cupboards had healthy food in them; everything was seemingly made for us to enjoy life and to work on ourselves. I joked about getting some abs, and Sal laughed. For a second, it seemed so hopeful.

It wasn’t going to last, of course. But I didn’t know that then. I couldn’t have been aware of what was going to happen - how could I? All I knew was the future. It looked like a second chance and a fresh start on my marriage. I could undo all the late nights we’d spent silently marking papers and working with textbooks to plan lessons.

In retrospect, I should have gotten my first indicator something was amiss when they introduced us to the digital avatars at orienteering. But I hadn’t really known what to look for then. Now that this has happened, I can see what I was supposed to notice ahead of time. It’s not pretty; I’ll tell you that for nothing. Sal is just getting up, so I’ll talk more about meeting my avatar in another entry.

Hopefully, with each new entry, I’ll get closer to a way out of this.

Log Entry #3 - April 23rd, 2072

It’s been roughly 12 hours since my last log entry. Today has been a hell, unlike anything I’ve ever known. The fallout from my digital avatar taking his life is now playing havoc with my own. My wife and I have spent the day in testy silence. She isn’t sure how to process what I’ve had to tell her.

Being unfaithful… It's a hard road to navigate. For the most part, as the person being lied to, betrayed, you’re mostly reacting to things. It makes sense, logically. You either get told of the infidelity, or you discover it yourself. Our situation is different. This is premeditated, almost hypothetical. How do you react to someone who says that in a decade, you’ll betray them with another man?

Sal reacted badly. I should have guessed as such. The protests that she couldn’t do such a thing were pointless - the evidence was right there. There was anger, denial, and then bitter resignation. We’ve not spoken much since then. I find myself blaming her, our broken marriage, my feelings of depression… and that digital avatar. God, I hate him. He wasn’t a cause of all this so much as the evidence, and it’s easy to pin it all on him.

I remember the first day I met the guy. It was the day after we'd settled into the new home. A letter on the table had said to report to a special facility the day after in the morning, to a process they called “orienteering.” I call it through a mirror, darkly.

The orienteering centre was a big, open building. It was easy to see where a lot of the budget had gone for the colony - this place was huge, glistening with modern technology, and overflowing with people. If there was ever a poster for the hopeful future of the human race, it was the Terra Nova Orienteering Centre.

When we got there, we were greeted by the most cheery representative you’d ever meet and taken to a room with half a dozen new couples. I vaguely recognised a guy from my university days in the back, and then this presentation came on.

Terra Nova was famous for its digital avatar by that point. It had been all over the news, and the presentation given was just part of the legend. There was a brief history of the project, from its initial conception decades prior to the first successful creation of a digital avatar. They called them DigiMe, but the majority of the public referred to them as the “DigiGangers”, myself included.

Anyways, the point was that this presentation had really pushed the envelope a bit more and waxed lyrical about these avatars. After that, we were all taken into individual rooms and scanned to create our avatars. That was a weird process. If you’ve ever been judged at length by someone, it’s a bit like that. Your entire life, physical appearance, medical history - it was all being dissected in front of your eyes, picked apart, and converted into digital information. Then, finally, with surprisingly little fanfare, my avatar popped into existence right in front of me.

It was always going to be a strange thing, looking at your doppelgänger. He was just like me in every way - the slight slouch, the strange look in his eye that I didn’t recognise at the time, that funny little mole I had below one eye. It was an example of staring into the mirror and seeing yourself, and for a frightening moment, not understanding what it was that looked back at you. Self-perception is a weird thing, eh?

But anyway. It was explained to us, during our time there, that the avatar would serve the very important task of living out the rest of our lives each night. Pause and re-read that slowly; you get where I am. As a concept, that’s just strange. But it was true. The avatar, each night, would live out a life that didn’t belong to it, my life, and that information would be used to make decisions about my welfare. If I had a major arthritis problem in a decade, the avatar would warn the colony ahead of time. It was that kind of weird premise, but it sounded so innocent at the time. That’s the thing. They make the whole idea sound so appealing.

I remember being so impressed at the time like it was really going to be the start of an incredible experience for me. The truth was obviously different, but still. It had been a major breakthrough in science. Standing there, in the orientation centre, looking around at all the shiny, new technology and watching these avatars come to life, how couldn’t you find yourself impressed by what had gone on? How couldn’t it have been such a wonderful experience for all involved? That’s what I keep telling myself.

The truth is that there’s this horrible feeling simmering away in the heart of me. The more I write, the more I commit to paper, the more that feeling grows. It’s like being consumed by something you don’t understand, wrapped up and absorbed by a great darkness that’s emerged from the recesses of your head. It gets worse when I look at my wife, and I don’t know what it is or how to stop it.

I guess I’ll have to make my peace with it soon. The colony has recovered the video files of the avatar, and they’re sending them over tomorrow. It’s going to be a very strange moment, I don’t doubt that. Considering the exceptional nature of the content, they want us to see what happened, what justified the actions they took. I guess we’ll have to wait and watch, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. Maybe by watching it, I’ll find a little inner peace? Maybe.

Log Entry #4 - April 24th, 2072

Today has arrived for me a lot like judgment day or the day of your own execution. I’ve barely slept. I don’t think I want to close my eyes. All I can think about now is what my avatar is going through in the simulation - what actions he takes, how those actions might tighten the bonds around me.

Everyday life in this colony is pretty routine, to be honest with you. You wake up at the same time every day and take your colony-mandated medication. They have medication for everything these days. I had to take a dozen vitamins and minerals, pills to help improve the function of my heart - this was the first thing we experienced upon joining the colony.

Now, in fairness, this was fairly transparent from the beginning. We were told that our medication packages would be delivered through the mail every night, and every night like clockwork, they did—a small box stamped with the colony logo and my name. The unidentifiable pills all laid out neatly - it must take them all day to prepare the following day’s pills.

This morning, however, my pills contain something of a new addition, and it’s put a sick taste in my mouth. There, written on the inventory stamp, in big letters, was one word.

“Antidepressants”.

I guess we’re starting antidepressants now, Jim. I still don’t know if you’ll read these. Maybe they’ll never release the files because I’m in the middle of whatever’s going on with my life right now. In either case, this feels like a gut punch.

There really is something to be said for tact and diplomacy with conditions like depression. I understand fully that these things can be problematic, but a little kindness goes a long way in helping it. What if I’m sensitive about these things? What if talking about it more is damaging for me right now?

That’s one of the things I’ve come to realise I don’t like about the colony. They have no tact, no humanity - it’s all just cold efficiency and logical outcomes. They don’t stop to consider the mental distress of breaking into my house overnight and taking all of my knives. They don’t care that it makes me sick and cold to see an antidepressant added to my daily medication like some kind of abhorrent label. They aren’t built to care. These workers, these supervisors in the colony, they only have one job - get everyone to 120. Nothing else mattered.

The lack of knives in the house has made a slight air of tension between myself and Sal, truthfully. Mind you, it isn’t like she’s talking much to me anyway these days. The last 24 hours have been quiet and tense. She didn’t go to work yesterday, but she will today. I’ve been placed on a temporary leave of absence while I deal with the “issues faced by the digital avatar on the morning of April 23rd”.

Technically, I know that neither of us has to work, but we both chose to do a little here and there. Teaching was a passion, but there was a heavy amount of paperwork that came with it, which neither of us were especially fond of. We both taught a single history class once a day, as Terra Nova had around 200 kids in the colony. The sons and daughters of rich tycoons and genius doctors.

But this morning, she and I sat in relative silence. She wasn’t keen on talking much, and I don’t blame her - things were still tense from the revelation she’d be unfaithful to me one day. It’s hard to come back from something like that, especially if you don’t have a defense for the physical proof sitting right in front of you.

When she left to go and get ready to teach her class, I audibly breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the tense atmosphere. I love my wife, but right now, I don’t know how to reconcile what’s going on with the future we both know to happen. I think that is probably one of the biggest failings of the colony. I don’t know how to deal with the future that I’ve been shown, and how could I? How does anybody prepare for the end of something when the issue doesn’t even exist yet?

She’s gone to work now. I just want this all to be over, but a part of me is slowly accepting the fact that this will never be the same again. They may not even realise it, but the colony has created an impasse between us, something that we can’t navigate. The evidence that our relationship is doomed to fail is right there in front of us, and it’s hard to argue with such a compelling cause. When it gets so bad that the government themselves intervene, what can you say?

I just don’t know what to do anymore. My mind is swirling with thoughts and feelings I’ve never had to grapple with properly. Living with this condition and then becoming aware of it are two very different things. Everything looks and feels different now. I’m scared for my future, I’m scared for my marriage, but at the same time, I’m scared of that pain. I’m starting to think that I will do anything to escape it. Part of me just wants to change destiny, to undo the acts of my digital avatar, just so we can go back to living a normal life, and a knife can just be used without any problems.

But that can never happen, can it? I’m stuck like this. We’ve become trapped in a circle of endless pain. No matter what happens, the videotape will come, we will have to watch it, and the whole truth will be revealed. Part of me knows that I’ll never be ready for that, but I have to know. I have to see the ending, I have to see what caused all of this.

I have to know the truth.

Log Entry #5 - April 24th, 2072

At long last, the moment has arrived. The thing I have been dreading all this time has now come to pass, and we’ve received the video file that contains the footage of my avatar. That same medical representative from the other day has come to watch with us. He says that the colony believes we will benefit from a mediator, and to be honest, he’s probably right. The tension between my wife and I has hit a breaking point recently. The last couple of hours has been almost intolerable.

The date on the footage is 2081. That’s nearly ten years from now, and it’s somewhere in the middle of winter. The footage begins with my avatar coming home from work. I look tired. That’s something I didn’t necessarily expect, the physical side of living with this condition for so long. I looked visibly deflated like all the wind had been knocked out of my sails years previously.

My avatar is disheveled. There’s a horrible scruffy beard on his face; his hair is longer than I like to keep it. But it was the eyes that drew me in the most. They were cold, dead. I've been told for years that my eyes were full of fire; they looked so alive, so happy. This man had nothing. His eyes were blank and empty; there was no spark, no fire, nothing to distinguish him from the person that I am right now. It was like looking at a stranger, but the sickening reality was that I knew this man. I am this man.

The house he lives in is empty, bare. It looks different from ours, and I realise with a jolt that this is no longer my home in 10 years. Clearly, my avatar was at a point where I had chosen to leave home, maybe to surrender it to her and whoever it was that she had been unfaithful with. This new dwelling of mine was almost a parallel. It just looked sad and lonely. Maybe it was the slightly withering plant on the windowsill or the unopened mail on the table, but I felt sorry for this person because clearly his motivation to do anything was gone.

We watch as my avatar moves mostly on instinct. He doesn’t seem to particularly acknowledge the world around him, but he moves quite naturally. I see the edge of a paper protrude from the bag that he is carrying, and I recognise it to be belonging to a student. I’m glad about this. I’m glad that my avatar continues to teach, even in the face of such troubling times, because it means that he hasn’t fully surrendered hope yet.

He just sits there for a moment, pausing on the sofa to acknowledge the world as if for the first time. You see painful eyes pass over the bare walls, and you understand that he’s barely had time to acknowledge any of it. I watch something unidentifiable fight its way onto his face, followed by grim resignation. It was at this point that I noticed the medical representative next to me shift unconsciously in the chair, and my pulse quickened a little. This was it; this was the moment.

We watch my avatar across to the drawer in the kitchen and take out a knife. It was just a simple cutting knife, but it was plenty sharp. I can see the tremble in his hand, the last dregs of self-preservation fighting to prevent what’s about to happen. He brings the knife down to the veins on his wrist and holds it there for a moment. He doesn’t move, doesn’t even flinch, just stares at the knife for a moment before putting it down, falling into a chair, and breaking into tears.

The video ends.

Wait a second, what?

That was it? What happened? I look to my wife, who looks just as confused as I do, and then to the medical representative, who just looked at me with pity. He starts to explain what happened after that, that my avatar tried to get help, that he slowly began to claw back to reality, but it’s like a buzz in my ear. There is a part of me that’s outraged with a fire that just keeps growing and growing. This was what warranted all this action? I haven’t even tried. Not really; I just took a knife out and played chicken with it for a second.

It was barely even… anything.

Something that the representative says manages to break through the bars of radio static in my brain.

He tells me that they had been aware for some time that my digital avatar had been suffering from these impulses. These suicidal thoughts had begun weeks prior, but the system hadn’t done anything until then. This didn’t make sense to me. Why would they just intervene now? Why haven’t they intervened weeks ago? Why were we only knowing about this now?

The representative starts to tell me that I would be required to undertake weekly mental assessments with a trained clinical counsellor. They inform me that if I pass the mandates and requirements, they will allow us to have knives in the home again. We are also expected to attend couples counselling in a month. My wife sees that I am clearly unable to deal with what’s going on, so she takes charge, thanks the representative for his time, and I hear the door close as he leaves.

She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at me, looks at the image of the broken man still paused on the video screen, and then goes upstairs. I am left, sitting down here, by myself, contemplating the true horror that has taken place.

It was never about me. I understand that now. My depression was never the issue here, but something I have learned is that the real danger is the colony.

This is the nightmare I’ve become trapped in.

 Final Log Entry - April 25th, 2072

 It's 1 am. I can’t sleep, I can’t think, I just can’t begin to process what it is that I’ve been subjected to, the things that I have had to grapple with over the last 24 hours. They lied to me. They lied to all of us.

This colony, this idea, it’s a sham. It’s taken me two years of living here to realise the truth. This isn’t about extending lifespans; this is about control. They wanted to control people, and that’s what they’ve done.

Think about it. This colony has been engineered to allow people to live a longer lifespan, but it has also been engineered to strip them of free will. Choice has been taken away from me, from my wife, from everybody who lives here, and we don’t even realise it. The nature of the simulations means that whatever happens now, it’s predetermined.

Think about it. The simulation predicted that my marriage would break down and my wife would leave me, and now my marriage is starting to break down. It had been fine before that. The simulation predicted that my depression would cause me to try and take my own life, and now it’s worse than ever. The thoughts, the demons inside my head, have been magnified 1000 times by that video, by the intervention of the colony, by everything.

What kind of society allows people to break into someone’s home in the middle of the night to confiscate knives from ordinary folks? They were goddamn kitchen knives. They were used for cutting food. Thus goes beyond protecting us; this is a violation of privacy, of free will, of our freedoms as people. This wasn’t the hopeful, incredible vision of the future that I signed up for. This wasn’t the utopia that I wanted to see; this is a sham, this is a falsehood, this is a dictatorship.

The seemingly hopeful mandate of making sure everybody lives to 120 has been taken and walked beyond belief. Even at the height of the problems that we experienced on earth, this never happened. When it did, this was a heinous, barbaric act, the violation of personal freedoms. Nowadays, in the colony, this is considered routine. You don’t own your property; the colony does. If they want to come into your house and take something from you because it’s proven to be a health risk, then they’re going to do just that, and you can’t stop them.

And that’s it, isn’t it? The more that I type, as I sit here and write this log entry, the final pieces of the puzzle slot into place. You’re probably never going to read this, Jim. They won’t let you.

I’ve become trapped up here. The act of creating a digital avatar that lives out the rest of my life for me has robbed me of a free choice. I don’t care what they say about the program; I don’t care that they claim it changes with our lives; this is wrong. This is a violation of my personal freedom, my right to choose, and my very life. Everything that I am, everything I think, believe, do, it’s all been pulled apart, broken down into digital information used to create a facsimile of me.

This is it, isn’t it? This is what the sceptics and the cynics said about it years ago when the colony was just being built. They warned us that we would be surrendering control of our lives to artificial intelligence. They warned us that we would surrender everything that makes human life worth living for the sake of eking out a few more years on the clock. They were dismissed, laughed at, but they were right all along.

This colony is playing God. I’ve become a rat in a cage, drawn in by the promise of longer life, and then subjected to a weird, twisted social experiment. It’s no longer my life to control; it belongs to the colony. Their simulations now decide my future. These decisions have been made in the last 36 hours; they will forever change my life. I’ll be a different person now than that digital avatar because of their intervention. But the worst part of this, the thing that I cannot even begin to grapple with is that I don’t have a choice.

For the first time in my life, I am completely helpless. I cannot decide what happens to me. You can’t leave the colony until you die. This is a one-way trip, we knew this signing on, but at the time, it all sounded so safe, so peaceful.

I’m scared, Jim. This is my nightmare now. I’m never going to see you again; I’m never going to see earth again. I’m stuck in the colony now; I’ve become one of the many rats that they experiment with. My life is now decided by a digital avatar for filling a potential world. It's living out a potential existence, and the decisions that have been made as a result of that existence are now destroying the life I have worked so hard to build.

No, this can’t be it. I have to find a way off. I have to get out of here; I have to warn the world about what’s happened. I have to tell people about the dark secret growing at the heart of Terra Nova.

I will not be a victim of a social experiment. I will not be controlled by artificial intelligence. I have to be the one that makes it out alive. There are transport and cargo ships coming in all the time; I could sneak aboard one of them, stow my way back to earth, warn everybody. I have to get this place shut down; I have to save people from this.

I have to escape-  

…

Sys Error: 1+ messages have been flagged as:

HARMFUL / CRIMINAL IN NATURE

All flagged messages will be purged from the system in 5 minutes. Colony security will be dispatched to your home.

Have a nice day.

Commissioned and Edited by Craig Barratt, Health Strategy and Transformation consultant

Authored by Anna Mae

Many thanks to Futurist Dr John McGhee for his expert guidance and support