Chapter Three

So many years after the Overlords' arrival, the headlines were pale and anodine compared to those before. With crime nearly non-existant, discoveries slowing, and few actual needs left on the planet there was little to report on. Perfect paternity testing and contraception for all resulted in a loosening of social mores that co-incidentally removed most of the scandals that would otherwise have filled them, leaving the newspapers grateful for any copy they received.

Rikki Stormgren's funeral was front page news. He did not live to see the Overlords revealed, as he had known he would not. If life extension technology existed, it had not been developed far enough, the Overlords content for humanity to make do with the removal of hunger and disease. There was a brief flurry of interest in his life, rumours of a certain device, but his recorded denials he had seen anything quelled the kerfuffle. The last interview he had ever given, with a journalism student years before, confirmed it.

The funeral was attended by hundreds, hundreds of thousands, who had never met him, never been born when he had represented humanity to their new Overlords. The administrator in charge of Europe, appointed by the Overlords when they dissolved the UN, was in attendence. The Overlord ship hanging in the sky above sent no signal or sign.

Once it was over, like all such five minute wonders, humanity turned its attention to the next diversion.

#

"Immersive hyper-realistic entertainment," Tian said, nearly knocking the canape plate over his companion as it hovered passed. The blonde starlet, one of the many at Sunil's party, was half-drunk and exotically English. If they hit it off, they could have a great night together. The rest of the entertainment had been standard for these top-class events, live singers, actors, and some pretty good effects. To his professional eye it was nothing special, but nothing ever was now the Overlords had arrived.

"Isn't everyone doing that now?" The blonde's head went back, and she looked boredly at the ceiling.

"I know." Tian gestured with his own glass, and the auto-refill topped it up. Somehow all their advances had made art as stifled as science. Real progress was slowing, and he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen something actually new. "But where else is there to go?"

"Virtual environments!" she chirped, happily braindead.

"Been done," he scoffed. They were good for meetings, but the lack of tangible substance irritated him. "And the Overlords do it better anyway."

"Nonono, hear me out," She slurred her words slightly, leaning forward. "These three guys, like, they jumped on stage during the play."

"They wanted to be part of the performance. It happens." And it was annoying as hell. Spend all those hours making everything just right and someone closes up on it and starts knocking the scenery over. Phillistines.

"So what if its a holographic play?" she said, and Tian thought about it.

"Fully three dimensional so you could get right up to the action? View the scene from any angle?" He patted her hand and waved her glass for the auto-refill to go off. "It doesn't look realistic. The audience can put their hands through the images."

"So make the audience, like, invisible or sommin'" she bleared, and on a side thought, he refilled his own glass. Tonight was going to be a fun night, but this was a pretty unusual idea.

"So track the audience's movements in the virtual world and erase them..." A shared virtual world where the audience were invisible, could all interact the recording of a live performance from any angle. It would be difficult but possible. "They'd walk into each other."

"How'd you get round tha'?" she frowned, waving her magically empty glass again. Tian found himself thinking it through.

"Some form of proximity warning? A way to let them be in our out of the simulation without stopping it for others in the same space..." He wasn't paying much attention to her any more and she popped her head down on the table, completely gone. "...It would have to stop them seeing or hearing each other, smell? Poor cleanliness of an audience member or could I use chemicals for added..."

Tian pushed the plates aside, reaching for his recpadd but it was in his luggage. So he used the next best thing.

Two hours later he apologised to his host, who saw what he'd been working on and pulled out his own design board. Eventually he went up to his room, the scrawled-on tablecloth bundled up under his arm and his head full of ideas for a brand new approach to art.

He'd quite forgotten about the blonde.

#

Owen Keel stood on the edge of the bridge, staring down at the black waters far below. There was nothing left. The last of the funding for his projects had been removed. There was no point, they said, in investing in space flight. Jenrick, his boss, had sat back complacently when Keel had protested. There was no point in working on spaceflight, Jenrick had said, because when humanity is ready for the stars the Overlords will tell us. Hell, he'd laughed round his cigar, they'll probably give us the ships! Keel had said nothing.

He looked to the sky. The city was ten miles away, yet curve of the great ship the hung over it eclipsed the sky, leaving a black void where the stars cut out. It was fitting, he thought bitterly. His work was over and if, after all these years, the Overlords had shown no signs of rescinding their ban on space travel for humanity, so was his life.

Science was falling apart, peer review happening less and less as the great institutions became replaced by a collection of amateurs. Humanity had more resources and more time than ever before, and yet it seemed to be producing less and less, progressing less and less. Keel's own work moldered in a library somewhere, with the rest of the lab's, and he knew better than to think any of the many seperated individuals the scientific community was becoming would pick it up. Why study something where progress could be theory alone, the only subject certain to irritate their benevolent Overlords?

He looked up once more at the stars, eager, envious and longing. One day, he swore to them silently, one day a man will reach the stars. Keel was still looking up when he jumped. He never felt himself hit the water.

#

It was not a golden age, not yet, but the gilt was on the rose. Humanity might be barred from the stars, but the ocean depths and highest mountains were there to explore and map. The loss of the Ocean Challenger and its fifty person crew, two days into its mission to the Mariana Trench, lead to explorers scurrying back to the drawing board to design new vehicles for the automated factories to churn out, and then to a second, successful, mission. Air cars let people fly above Everest on their daily commute. Inevitably each inch of the earth's surface was conquered and mapped. The first view of their Overlords was only a year or so away, and they need merely wait.

The collapse of a small volcanic island in the South Pacific was little more than a footnote. The fact it had once been the site of humanity's plans for the stars was the only reason it was even that. Humanity had other dreams now, of comfort, and luxury, and few turned their eyes to the stars for anything more than a moment. The stars had come to them, and brought utopia. What more could they need?