[Teralogos News] Traveler's Tale

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Traveler's Tale

COLUMBIA STATION, Earth Orbit/Teralogos  Feb 25, 2101    
    
They gave Sven Egilsson the Fergus Memorial Award for travel writing last week. Normally, the ceremony is held in November, but they had to wait this time; Egilsson insisted on collecting it in person, and that meant that he had to come half-way across the system to Columbia Station. It may seem good of them to delay things just for him, but given what he won it for, it was fitting. And when I asked to interview him, he insisted on meeting me in person, too, and I couldn't argue.    
    
Which is why I'm sitting in a Columbia Station bar, drinking locally brewed beer, when everyone starts staring at the doorway. After all, you don't see many non-humanoid cybershells in bars, and Egilsson's custom 'shell is an arachnophobe's nightmare, with limbs which switch between use as legs, arms, or sensor masts seemingly at random, and a heavy casing that looks like it's been sandblasted and then tinted with unearthly acids. Which, in fact, it has - on Mars and Venus, amongst other places.    
    
He scuttles across the room to me, asks what I'm drinking, then pauses before announcing that he's downloaded the flavor model from the Web, and yes, it tastes good to him. For a radical transhumanist personality upload - a ghost - Egilsson seems awfully attached to the experiences of flesh.    
    
Which is somewhat the point here. Egilsson is a traveler who believes in doing things the old-fashioned way. When he wants to visit another planet, he doesn't just have himself beamed there, or even sit in orbit and teleoperate a tourist cybershell; he goes down in person, in the same cybershell every time. (Which is why it has to be a custom model. In fact, it's probably the toughest, most versatile cybershell you'll meet outside the U.S. Army.) And he doesn't power down while he's in transit, either; he travels by fastliner, and mingles with the other passengers all the way.    
    
You may gather that Egilsson is quite rich. Believe me, travel writing doesn't pay well enough to support all that. So I ask him why he bothers, when he could just as easily sit at home on a very secure mainframe with a virtual harem, and download all the slinky records of other places that he might ever want. At which, a small screen pops out of the cybershell and displays the face that belonged on his old body, which smiles.    
    
"I'm interested in making the most of reality," he says, "not in escaping from it."    
    

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- filed by Phil Masters