An Experiment into the Controlled Release of Information about the Future.

[Gilhelmi]

Before we get into the bases, I guess we need to go over "Souls". It's times like this that I remember all the minor things we take for granted, but it's an important part of our culture.

In my time, death from old age is something that is relegated to history. Disease on Earth was wiped out long ago; cancer became a mild annoyance that needed little more than corrective gene therapy and pinpoint removal. Accidents can still happen, but don't matter. See, we understand the nature of the "Soul" so we just catch the spirit and put you in a new body. Kind of like the Asgards in SG-1, except the genetic decay thing was easily solved by, and get this you are going to laugh at how simple it is, allowing random combinations of to mix and then trimming out serious disorders. Just like in nature *facepalm*. Yeah, you won't look exactly the same as before, but we stopped caring as much about our outward appearance when we realized that "Souls" were real. Racism is a distant, bad, memory. Now, skin and body features are more based on where you choose to live. For example, if you move to Africa, you will be given a "Black" skinned body. This is to reduce the chance of sunburns and skin cancer (because, even though cancer is very treatable in my time, it still takes medical resources and there is no point in treating something preventable). Likewise, if you live far north, you will be given a more "White" skinned body. This is because the amount of sunlight is lower and human bodies need to metabolize the vitamin D as efficiently as possible. (Depending on how far north, you might also be a lot hairier.) In addition, we had to fully re-engineer the brain to allow most memories that the soul had to enter the new body, but it was worth it. We are still developing this, we can only remember the last 1500 years of past lives. But it looks like we might have reached our limit for now. (Hence, the reason we have to come back in time to do research.) This gave the added benefit that almost everyone has the intellect of Albert Einstein, Sir Issac Newton, and anyone else you can think of; all rolled into one.

Nationalism is still a problem, because we humans are still a prideful lot. We have a lot fewer nations, and neighboring nations usually get along very well. It is much more like an "idealized" version of your United States; 50 nations, under one central governing nation that represents the whole and manages cross 'state' matters like regional utilities, infrastructure, and crime (though we don't have much crime as criminals can't just die to get their records expunged anymore, like what happens in your era.)

When "Souls" were first discovered, we found that most of the world's religions were partially right in one way or another. I am not allowed to risk cultural contamination too much, but I can say it was a combination of Rebirth, Heaven/Hell rest, and flowing energies. This led to an "interesting" time for Earth.

Wars were still a thing before we started cloning ourselves. Shortly after this new age began, bizarrely enough, the number of wars actually skyrocketed. Death was a minor annoyance, just wait for 'respawn' at the cloning facility. Fortunately, after 20 long years of stupidity, people realized just how wasteful blowing each other up really was. Recycling wasn't (and still isn't) 100%, so wood needed to be grown, synthetic materials needed to be made from resources that needed to be mined, so on and so on. And of course, DYING STILL HURTS. I remember the first couple times I was shot, blown up, and I still refuse to get on boats because drowning is the just the worst thing. Only a couple hundred more years and I will not be able to remember that time.

This also led to another strange quirk, National leaders. Sure, ruling for life sounds great and all, until life is unending and no one wants to after 75 or 100 years. Even Legislative and Judicial positions are incredibly draining for a person. About 200 years after we became immortal, most leaders wanted to do something, anything, else. New term limits were set by most nations for between 50 to 100 years, with a required break of a few decades. These jobs started to become true "public service" positions and some places even had to resort to "Drafting" people into the low level bureaucracy jobs. By the 600 year mark, most nations settled into a good routine. No new laws were being made, all social reforms were done (poverty was wiped-out), all that was left was budgeting to keep law enforcement and utilities going; with Scientific Research and Development being the 'new' "military" budget. Resources were still dwindling, only a couple thousand years left by most estimates, and when you are immortal, that is within your lifetime.

The problem was, we were still competing with everyone for resources. Even though the fighting was no longer physical, it could ruin nations financially if they made the wrong enemies. Trading alliances formed and the new wars were being fought in "Dollars and Cents". Buying and selling resources the new weapons of war, resources were our ammunition.

There were five main Trading alliances. I am not allowed to use the actual names of the nations, so I will just refer to the continents where they were (fortunately, most of the surrounding nations allied with their neighbor). North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and the biggest power house Africa. Their technology was the greatest. While everyone else was recycling rate of 50-65%, their tech gave them a huge advantage at almost 90%; giving them a huge trade advantage.

The only logical thing to do with only a couple thousand years of resources was to look up and try to mine the rest of the Solar System. Terra-form Venus, maybe set up small colonies to try and push back the end date of our resources until matter-replication could be perfected. It was our only hope.

Hopefully, next time I can finally talk about bases. And feel free to ask any questions.