Status Updates From Every Version of You

Uploading is a trade – for something bigger and newer and shinier. Earth is spent. The search for an extraterrestrial new home has been too slow. This is the solution of least resistance. In order to transmigrate everyone into a digital utopia, humanity has perpetuated a collective denial.

Xin-Yi’s gaze drifts to a spot above her daughter’s head. ‘It’s not for me. I’ve never wanted to live for a long time, let alone indefinitely.’
Heaviness bears down on her shoulders. ‘But Ma, when they Upload you they can tweak your mind, make things easier …’
‘I don’t want to be tweaked. It wouldn’t be me.’

Tao-Yi closes her eyes. Even their mechanical creations reincarnate the hallmarks of feminine subservience – wholly attentive, gushing and pleasant, nurturing to the pinnacle of self-deprivation, with a garnish of sexual subordination.

..utopia?’
‘..no one suffers in Gaia.There’s no pain or poverty or crime–or almost none,anyway.We’re inching closer to equality. Isn’t that something?’
‘It’s not really equality.Not when so many people have been left out from the start.’
Zach frowns.‘They’re trying to establish universal access—’
‘U know that’s a pipe dream.Rich people own Gaia.Regular people wriggle their way in.Poor people don’t even make it in.’

‘Nothing new. It’s just the system we live in.’
‘A stupid system. I don’t want to buy into it.’
‘I don’t either, but we don’t really have a choice, unless we want to get left behind.’

They got off the e-bus in front of the Federation Square Memorial, built to commemorate the lives lost in America’s 2041 airstrike attacks on Melbourne.

Full body pods