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Description

Hola, amigos and burritos, and welcome to another fun and family-friendly episode of It’s Over Sunny In Heavendelphia, starring Charlie Day as the sequence of morally-bankrupt decisions which brought you to this opening paragraph! Like waking up this morning! Reminder for future readers: this was written during a period of heightened tension between nuclear states, this could have been the last thing I ever committed to written language, or the last thing you, person reading this on April 1st 2022, might ever read. This might even be the last thing shared on the Internet. What if the world ends before anyone can read this? Would that make a sound? And the moral of this story is that we all make mistakes.

Now about Easter Island.

Rapa Nui was always an isle of madness, drawing far-flung visitors across immaterial realms. Located near Point Nemo (the area of ocean most distant from dry land), the first inhabitants arrived by canoe from the Cook Islands, led by chief Hotu Matu'a, after imagining a far-off country in a dream and deeming it a worthwhile place to flee from a neighboring chief. At their time of arrival, the island had one lone settler, the mysterious Nga Tavake 'a Te Rona. The ponderous moai statues which have made Easter Island famous the world over were, at one point, believed by Europeans to have not been made by the Rapa Nui people. Rather, it was posited for a time that Easter Island was but a remnant of the lost continent of Mu, which sank beneath the waves of a great cataclysm, depending on who you ask, spurred on by the civilization’s extreme wickedness.

The true secret of the moai, however, was much worse.

The statues, made from the island’s volcanic rock, were built to honor the Rapa Nui’s ancestors. According to oral tradition, the statues “walked” from the volcanic quarry where they were carved, to their final destinations overlooking the shorelien cliffs. In truth, they were moved via a combination rocking back and forth and the use of rolling logs. They really did walk. However, in addition to the mass deforestation of the island’s palm trees to move these statues, the invasive Polynesian rat, introduced to the island by the Rapa Nui’s ancestors, devastated Easter Island’s native flora, and with this came the collapse of Rapa Nui civilization. Social order broke down as warfare on the overpopulated island descended into lawlessness and predatory bands, with many Rapa Nui seeking refuge in the island’s caves. Famine, cannibalism, poor cannibal table manners, mass destruction, the bizarre and violent “Bird Man” cult. And iconoclasm. From 1770 onwards, a period of statue toppling, or “huri mo'ai”, saw competing groups attempt to destroy the socio-spiritual power embodied by the statues, making sure to break them in the fall to ensure they were dead and without power. By the 1860s, no moai were left standing, and the island’s population of 15,000 had been reduced to 1,500, before being further decimated by smallpox and European slave-raids. In time, these stone witnesses were erected once more, to cast an enigmatic, mournful gaze upon the endless expanse of the sea.

2101 was such an unpleasant year for everyone on Planet Earth, you could be forgiven for not regarding the fate of the ~7,000 residents of Easter Island. For fifteen minutes on July 16th 2101, global temperatures rose to an average of 260 degrees Celsius (500 degrees Fahrenheit) as a consequence of the Beijing Impact. This was Hell Day, and Easter Island was not exceptional to anywhere else on Earth. The entire population died from hyperthermia, or were left with extremely debilitating traumatic brain injuries that gave them life expectancies no longer than a few days at most as they wasted away from dehydration. It was a dry day on Easter Island, and the entire island burst into flames from the high temperatures, fanned by winds off the ocean. And in the decades to come, the great global sea level rise resulting from awakening Antarctic volcanoes, known as The Surge, metastasized the shore higher and higher upon Easter Island, reaching a maximum of 70 meters, drowning most of the moai.

The rest of the Earth saw itself depopulated and in extreme disrepair, the full and exact details of which are irrelevant to the story of Easter Island, although a brisk overview is pertinent. Nobody on the surface but the most fortunate and a handful of especially hardy cyborgs made it to the end of the week. High above the Earth, thousands of massive space habitats were reduced to hypervelocity shrapnel after being shredded by ejecta kicked upwards by the Impact, creating the deadly Kessler Cloud, and in the brief window between Hell Day setting the land ablaze, and Kessler debris rendering low orbit completely uninhabitable, hundreds of thousands abandoned their stations for a scorched Earth. And of these, half the survivors perished along with most of the biosphere, in the Long Night - a decade-long winter brought on by all the dust, ash and soot injected into the atmosphere on Hell Day. Indeed, the destruction of the Impact was not limited to the Earth, or even Exonesia, but visited upon Luna as well, as ejecta rained down on the moon, killing millions in a disastrous event known as The Hail.

In the span of a week, the population of the Earth system had fallen by several billions and was still hemorrhaging lives by the second. And for every human life, three to four entire species vanished forever. And the stoic visages of the moai remained unflinching through it all as the flames on the island crackled and lit the growing darkness. Virtually nothing happened on Easter Island for nearly a whole century, save for the crashing of waves and the whistling of wind against bare rock. All that changed in the late 2190s.

Despite sharing in the pain of Hell Day, Luna surprised Sol with its ability to get its act together. After an insane political drama which saw the original Lunar Union replaced by the modern Lunar Covenant, came a series of wars. First to drive the Martians off Luna, and then to drive the Martians out of the rest of Cis-Lunar space, followed by a half-century of interplanetary conflicts, primarily against, you guessed it, the Martians. That last part ended with way less triumphalism than the Covenant had intended. Which is how you say “the moonmen got their powdered tushes kicked by the bug-eating rusties”, without saying “the moonmen got their powdered tushes kicked by the bug-eating rusties”. Eager to change the subject, there was a major subsequent shift in focus for the Covenant, away from dreams of “unifying humanity” across Sol, to “repairing” the Earth. Or as some would say, colonizing it, as a vent for pent up energy from failed imperial ambitions abroad.

Before we go into the fate of Easter Island, let’s take a detour to a less awful example of Luna’s activities on Earth, as a means of comparison. The Galapagos Islands sustained similar damage as Easter Island. Fire, water, ice and darkness dealt a fatal blow to the islands. Scientists in the archipelago had spent the better part of two centuries working to preserve the native tortoise, finch and marine iguana species, only for them to be virtually extinguished in a single day, but the island was not lifeless. Enter “Darw.in”, a distributed turingrade intelligence created in 2051 by the Ecuadorian government. He was modeled so closely after the 19th century naturalist, his first words were to ask what had become of his favorite sexy cousin Emma, I mean, his wife, I mean, I mean…wait, Charles Darwin married his cousin? FFFFUUUU- anyway, he got over the news that she’d been dead for 155 years, once he caught wind of this “DNA” thing. And on the day of judgment, Darw.in persisted as the only “living” thing in the archipelago, in the safety of servers scattered across the archipelago, kept alive by geothermal energy, and all on his lonesome, Darw.in began to enlist the other machines in the archipelago to begin rebuilding the native environs. The Selenites discovered this unusual activity in the Galapagos, and in 2200, Biocare CEO Samson Al-Bakr, a wealthy mogul and philanthropist from the Lunar state of Kaguya, made an offer to Darw.in to assist with the rehabilitation of the Galapagos.

In 2385, while much of the archipelago remains underwater to this day, the Galapagos has become one of the most important bioremediation sites on Earth. Hanging along the great cliff faces like shelf-fungi on massive tree stumps, stark white megastructures serve as breeding grounds and surrogate habitats for countless species. Some are breeding programs helping species that just barely survived Hell Day rebuild their numbers. Others are lazurogenesis programs looking to resurrect species driven to extinction by the apocalypse - often making extensive use of banked genomes stored in vaults on the Lunar surface. And others still are neogenesis projects, assigned to the somewhat grim task of engineering new organisms to live on a permanently-changed Earth. And through it all, Darw.in has been at the helm, his systems routinely upgraded and expanded, his presence everywhere in the archipelago whether as a hologram, an arspace sprite or an android, and his attentions multifaceted. Beyond simply preserving the heritage of the Galapagos, he’s made some improvements of his own, in the form of “pet projects'', such as uplifting finches with human-level hive consciousness, and conversing with cognitively-enhanced tortoises to gift the universe with their uniquely-slow perspective on the world. And then there’s Darw.in’s more broad interest in natural selection, studying the animals and plants which made it through Hell Day and seeing how they adapt, as well as the stranger phenomenon on the new Earth, such as nanites in sea water - once upon a time deployed to feed on microplastics, now radiating into peculiar new niches, as wild non-biotic life forms, not unlike himself.

All this, sponsored by Biocare corporate philanthropy, is one of the more positive examples of a land on Earth revitalized by private interests from the Lunar Covenant.

And then there’s Easter Island. Which one would be forgiven for mistaking for Martian propaganda.

Founded in 2004, Deciduous Technologies (“DecTec”) was the largest producer and distributor of VR and AR experiences and interfaces on Luna by 2040. However, antitrust legislation saw DecTec dismembered in 2082, with the largest surviving fragment rebranding as Parbex Entertainment Group. Through downsizing, lawsuits and the Hail, Parbex survived by being the largest distributor of virch porn on Luna, thanks to its iron grip on a controlling share of XMUNDO, a literal world of erotic geography, composed of microtransactions plugged directly into the pleasure center of the user’s brain. No matter how bad things got on the moon, Selenites were still willing to pay for orgasms. Parbex played a very minor, somewhat obscure role in the rise of the Lunar Covenant, and for his patronage, Parbex’s CEO, the quasi-immortal Galen Alensky (born 2001, died 2069, reborn as a digital lifeform 2069) has always been granted the hushed favor of the Covenant’s leadership. And it was under this pretense that Parbex’s expedition to Easter Island was sponsored by the Covenant’s Ministry of Terrestrial Heritage, beginning in 2198. Parbex Presents: Easter Island.

And now, without further ado, let us skip a short 187 years into the future. It’s bad, but it’s not that bad. Okay it is. Your eyes probably caught the third sentence of the next line after this paragraph, you know what’s coming. Oh dear, no, I did not mean for that to be a pun. But what else are you gonna do? Hit that little X button on the tab and go do something else? Wait, no, don’t do that! AAAAAAAAA

Oh good, you didn’t click off just yet. Ahem. Easter Island’s covered in porn.

Alright, not really (you saw this, it’s the only reason you continued reading, breaking the fourth wall isn’t as funny as I thought it would be, I’ll stop now). Asking any generic person in 2385 about Easter Island is like asking someone in 2022 what they know about Tessaoua, Niger. “Who?”, they’ll remark, because statistically they’re more likely to live on Mars than on Earth, and were unaware such a place existed until you brought it up to them. But if they’re even a little bit aware of small islands on Planet Earth, they’ll know that it’s “covered in porn”. They’re not aware of any of its rich history or culture, just this crass factoid. But of course, this is a silly and, by definition, uninformed appraisal of the situation on Easter Island. The truth is far sillier.

First, the good. Parbex moved 524 submerged moai statues further inland to higher elevations. Additionally, the extinct Rapa Nui Palm was reintroduced to the island. Well, a similar-enough palm, anyway. More on them later. The island was also made one landmass again thanks to aggressive land-reclamation projects linking the short-lived archipelago together, using lots and lots of concrete and rock from the Andes. Indeed, the island’s principal settlement, Hanga Roa, was raised from the sea, albeit on big ugly concrete slabs; today, it serves as the primary harbor, airport and spaceport to the island. And with that, we reach the end of Parbex’s good deeds.

As part of a collaborative effort with the Covenant Ministry of Terran Heritage, Parbex has recreated pre-colonial Rapa Nui as an immersive experience of mixed augmented-reality, virtual-reality and android actors. On the surface, Rapa Nui seems like any ordinary tropical island with creepy stone statues on it, but this belies a layer of arspace overlaying every inch of the island, which can be seen either with ocular prosthesis or proprietary AR glasses. Central processing for this great simulation is run from facilities dug deep into Ma′unga Terevaka, the island’s largest volcano and geothermal power source for most of the data-heavy operations on the island, although for an enterprise of this scale, the island’s entire environment has been tailored in service to it.

Those palm trees I mentioned earlier? While superficially similar in size and appearance to the extinct Rapa Nui Palm, on the inside, they’re quite different. Engineered with organic biocircuitry, neurocellulose, BPV cells (biophotovoltaic) and other cybernetic innovations, some of these traits are with the tree from before it’s even a seed, others are installed surreptitiously when it’s a sapling, and others are installed at later stages in the tree’s life cycle and regularly updated and maintained by the island’s staff. Some palms on Easter Island are cybernetic solar-energy collectors, others act as part of a distributed server network, some are projectors and arspace nodes, some are device recharging stations for visitors, some are security systems. Great care has been put into obscuring the synthetic elements of these trees, where the line isn’t simply blurred; non-experts aren’t able to discern what any given tree is actually there for. Every tree on the island has a role to play, and is part of a carefully-planned network spanning the entire island. Other computation systems are seamlessly integrated into the local scenery as rocks, hills, even some of the famous statues on the island are in fact replicas with various computer systems on the inside.

With this multifaceted technosystem at Parbex’s disposal, one can bear witness to an ultra-realistic recreation of Ancient Rapa Nui. More than a simple visual overlay across your field of vision, you’ll experience the sounds, smells and even textures of this lost world, recreated to precise historical accuracy in AR, VR and RL. The sprites in this arspace recreate a harrowing tale of ecological destruction and violence. Visit the stone village of Orongo along the caldera of Rano Kau, and see the moai crafted in real time - even participate yourself. Take a journey to the sunken island of Motu Nui. Long submerged beneath the waves, Parbex built a pressurized dome over this small rocky island, site of the rituals of the Bird Man cult. Descending down to the islet, the entire space inside the dome is filled by synthetic sunlight and the empty blue sky painted by billions of microscopic diodes. Seated in a circle, visitors with wired DNIs can experience with their own nervous system the trials of the Hopu and the world’s deadliest egg hunt. In addition to the arspace ambiance, there are many opportunities for visitors to dive into these sorts of virch experiences - rowing the first canoe to arrive on the island, erecting the moai, tearing them down, meeting the Europeans. All of these experiences will feel as real as the reality you already take for granted. Most visitors do not even visit Easter Island, but plug their nervous systems into machines back on Luna, and partake in the island via virch servers located on the island. In-person visitors to the island can actually interact with these virtual tourists, via augmented reality, allowing for mixed tourism parties - and making it so family members who for whatever reason couldn’t leave Luna for the family vacation on Easter Island, can still tag along, or at least, can for as long as the satellites are all lined up.

Now, there was some artistic license taken with Parbex’s recreation of Easter Island. In the physical realm, the reclaimed land was built with a bit of an artistic flair. And in the immaterial realm, Easter Island’s virch and arspace is filled with strange creatures and spirits from Polynesian myth, some of which can be filtered out, while others are random encounters even for vanilla tours. In many ways, Parbex’s recreation of Rapa Nui civilization is intended to recreate the mystical, mythological worldviews of the Rapa Nui people, sometimes balancing it with a more objective interpretation, other times veering into outright surreal magic. On Easter Island, layers of reality blur together, and within those layers, there are yet more layers - layers of nerve, mind and matter.

Every character on Easter Island, be they an arspace or virch sprite, or physical android, is a fully-realized, fully-sapient AI with its own personality, modeled after the ancient peoples of Rapa Nui. Depending on your sensory settings, you will feel the warmth of their skin when you shake their hands, and smell their breath when they speak. At the same time, they are more fundamentally not the natives of Rapa Nui, and they know this. Etched into their codes, on servers powered by Terevaka’s faint embers at the very heart of the island, is their fundamental purpose to represent the lives and times of the people of Easter Island, their history and their myths. Their joy and their tragedy. The people they were modeled after are long gone. None of their descendents exist today. They’ll never exist again, and nothing can replace them. All that lives on now, is their memory. And each character is aware that they are a memory. A second-hand memory of a bygone people - archetypes and conjecture, not blood long since washed out to sea. And yet, their purpose remains the sacred charity of immortality for the people of Rapa Nui.

Also, there’s lots of ads. Like, not even a little. A lot. Most are optically integrated into the environment in subtle ways. Your eye doesn’t immediately notice the patterns in the grain of the palm trees, or in the dirt, or in the flames of the village fires. But your brain sure notices them. Subconsciously. Others are smells, faint enough to be just barely detected, but gone at just the right moment to leave you wanting more. Some of the adverts are faint sounds carried on the wind. Advertisements are tailored for proper age demographics, individual native language and other factors. When you know what to sense for, the whole of Parbex Presents: Easter Island appears made of advertisements. Indeed, you’re meant to be led astray by the obvious ones intended to be red herrings and get you off your guard - some are not even for real products. And after over a century, adverts have been incorporated overtly, almost like self-aware theater, in the form of native advertising. For example:

Rapa Nui woman: “The tattoos on my cheeks are called pangaha’a, the tattoos on my hands are called rima kona, and for a limited time, XMUNDO is offering the Diamond Membership Perk.”

Rapa Nui shaman: “Act now and secure your exclusive avatar, Precious Crimson, and a stipend of 1,500 perla.”

Rapa Nui child: “Limited time offer expires in five hours, applicable only on Parbex-affiliated continents. Product rated for adults only.”

As said before, there are many layers of the arspace, which visitors can opt into. Some more surreal than others, some more erotic, others more brightly-colored and child-friendly. Many, many different layers. There are layers to the physical layer as well. There are sexbot versions of every sprite character in Parbex Presents: Easter Island, and one can rent any of them for the duration of their stay, complete with…the works.

But, with any large enterprise like this, there are of course hiccups. Being an island drenched in immersive arspace and holograms, there are of course times where visitors become too engrossed in what they’re doing, trip and fall - sometimes off a cliff. There are bugs in the system, albeit very uncommon ones. Inclimate weather is unfortunately real, and there’s no way to augment away rain or cloudy days. Or at least none that’s practical or cost-effective. There are also artifacts, digital lifeforms emerging from the code to do their own thing, assuming they don’t get deleted by the network’s immune system. And then there’s the mysterious presence known only as “Rona”, appearing infrequently to creep out occasional visitors. Some say he’s the angry spirit of the Rapa Nui people, back from the grave to haunt Parbex Presents: Easter Island. Some say he’s a viral sophware introduced by anti-Covenant activists to sabotage the commodification of Rapa Nui and its history. Some say, it’s all part of the ride, a spook inserted in the system by the company to spice things up.

And then there’s the fate of the moai. The most famous residents of Rapa Nui, her stalwart stone sentries, are today covered with a dense cloud of very overt arspace adverts, for Parbex products and sponsors, including XMUNDO. Removing one’s glasses or opting out one’s optical prosthetics will simply have the arspace ads replaced by an equally-dense cloud of holograms. Parbex Presents: Easter Island has multiple tiers, with the lowest, the Visitor Tier, requiring 100 terras for these particular adverts to be removed from one’s gaze.

Per moai.

Description

Hola, amigos and burritos, and welcome to another fun and family-friendly episode of It’s Over Sunny In Heavendelphia, starring Charlie Day as the sequence of morally-bankrupt decisions which brought you to this opening paragraph! Like waking up this morning! Reminder for future readers: this was written during a period of heightened tension between nuclear states, this could have been the last thing I ever committed to written language, or the last thing you, person reading this on April 1st 2022, might ever read. This might even be the last thing shared on the Internet. What if the world ends before anyone can read this? Would that make a sound? And the moral of this story is that we all make mistakes.

Now about Easter Island.

Rapa Nui was always an isle of madness, drawing far-flung visitors across immaterial realms. Located near Point Nemo (the area of ocean most distant from dry land), the first inhabitants arrived by canoe from the Cook Islands, led by chief Hotu Matu'a, after imagining a far-off country in a dream and deeming it a worthwhile place to flee from a neighboring chief. At their time of arrival, the island had one lone settler, the mysterious Nga Tavake 'a Te Rona. The ponderous moai statues which have made Easter Island famous the world over were, at one point, believed by Europeans to have not been made by the Rapa Nui people. Rather, it was posited for a time that Easter Island was but a remnant of the lost continent of Mu, which sank beneath the waves of a great cataclysm, depending on who you ask, spurred on by the civilization’s extreme wickedness.

The true secret of the moai, however, was much worse.

The statues, made from the island’s volcanic rock, were built to honor the Rapa Nui’s ancestors. According to oral tradition, the statues “walked” from the volcanic quarry where they were carved, to their final destinations overlooking the shorelien cliffs. In truth, they were moved via a combination rocking back and forth and the use of rolling logs. They really did walk. However, in addition to the mass deforestation of the island’s palm trees to move these statues, the invasive Polynesian rat, introduced to the island by the Rapa Nui’s ancestors, devastated Easter Island’s native flora, and with this came the collapse of Rapa Nui civilization. Social order broke down as warfare on the overpopulated island descended into lawlessness and predatory bands, with many Rapa Nui seeking refuge in the island’s caves. Famine, cannibalism, poor cannibal table manners, mass destruction, the bizarre and violent “Bird Man” cult. And iconoclasm. From 1770 onwards, a period of statue toppling, or “huri mo'ai”, saw competing groups attempt to destroy the socio-spiritual power embodied by the statues, making sure to break them in the fall to ensure they were dead and without power. By the 1860s, no moai were left standing, and the island’s population of 15,000 had been reduced to 1,500, before being further decimated by smallpox and European slave-raids. In time, these stone witnesses were erected once more, to cast an enigmatic, mournful gaze upon the endless expanse of the sea.

2101 was such an unpleasant year for everyone on Planet Earth, you could be forgiven for not regarding the fate of the ~7,000 residents of Easter Island. For fifteen minutes on July 16th 2101, global temperatures rose to an average of 260 degrees Celsius (500 degrees Fahrenheit) as a consequence of the Beijing Impact. This was Hell Day, and Easter Island was not exceptional to anywhere else on Earth. The entire population died from hyperthermia, or were left with extremely debilitating traumatic brain injuries that gave them life expectancies no longer than a few days at most as they wasted away from dehydration. It was a dry day on Easter Island, and the entire island burst into flames from the high temperatures, fanned by winds off the ocean. And in the decades to come, the great global sea level rise resulting from awakening Antarctic volcanoes, known as The Surge, metastasized the shore higher and higher upon Easter Island, reaching a maximum of 70 meters, drowning most of the moai.

The rest of the Earth saw itself depopulated and in extreme disrepair, the full and exact details of which are irrelevant to the story of Easter Island, although a brisk overview is pertinent. Nobody on the surface but the most fortunate and a handful of especially hardy cyborgs made it to the end of the week. High above the Earth, thousands of massive space habitats were reduced to hypervelocity shrapnel after being shredded by ejecta kicked upwards by the Impact, creating the deadly Kessler Cloud, and in the brief window between Hell Day setting the land ablaze, and Kessler debris rendering low orbit completely uninhabitable, hundreds of thousands abandoned their stations for a scorched Earth. And of these, half the survivors perished along with most of the biosphere, in the Long Night - a decade-long winter brought on by all the dust, ash and soot injected into the atmosphere on Hell Day. Indeed, the destruction of the Impact was not limited to the Earth, or even Exonesia, but visited upon Luna as well, as ejecta rained down on the moon, killing millions in a disastrous event known as The Hail.

In the span of a week, the population of the Earth system had fallen by several billions and was still hemorrhaging lives by the second. And for every human life, three to four entire species vanished forever. And the stoic visages of the moai remained unflinching through it all as the flames on the island crackled and lit the growing darkness. Virtually nothing happened on Easter Island for nearly a whole century, save for the crashing of waves and the whistling of wind against bare rock. All that changed in the late 2190s.

Despite sharing in the pain of Hell Day, Luna surprised Sol with its ability to get its act together. After an insane political drama which saw the original Lunar Union replaced by the modern Lunar Covenant, came a series of wars. First to drive the Martians off Luna, and then to drive the Martians out of the rest of Cis-Lunar space, followed by a half-century of interplanetary conflicts, primarily against, you guessed it, the Martians. That last part ended with way less triumphalism than the Covenant had intended. Which is how you say “the moonmen got their powdered tushes kicked by the bug-eating rusties”, without saying “the moonmen got their powdered tushes kicked by the bug-eating rusties”. Eager to change the subject, there was a major subsequent shift in focus for the Covenant, away from dreams of “unifying humanity” across Sol, to “repairing” the Earth. Or as some would say, colonizing it, as a vent for pent up energy from failed imperial ambitions abroad.

Before we go into the fate of Easter Island, let’s take a detour to a less awful example of Luna’s activities on Earth, as a means of comparison. The Galapagos Islands sustained similar damage as Easter Island. Fire, water, ice and darkness dealt a fatal blow to the islands. Scientists in the archipelago had spent the better part of two centuries working to preserve the native tortoise, finch and marine iguana species, only for them to be virtually extinguished in a single day, but the island was not lifeless. Enter “Darw.in”, a distributed turingrade intelligence created in 2051 by the Ecuadorian government. He was modeled so closely after the 19th century naturalist, his first words were to ask what had become of his favorite sexy cousin Emma, I mean, his wife, I mean, I mean…wait, Charles Darwin married his cousin? FFFFUUUU- anyway, he got over the news that she’d been dead for 155 years, once he caught wind of this “DNA” thing. And on the day of judgment, Darw.in persisted as the only “living” thing in the archipelago, in the safety of servers scattered across the archipelago, kept alive by geothermal energy, and all on his lonesome, Darw.in began to enlist the other machines in the archipelago to begin rebuilding the native environs. The Selenites discovered this unusual activity in the Galapagos, and in 2200, Biocare CEO Samson Al-Bakr, a wealthy mogul and philanthropist from the Lunar state of Kaguya, made an offer to Darw.in to assist with the rehabilitation of the Galapagos.

In 2385, while much of the archipelago remains underwater to this day, the Galapagos has become one of the most important bioremediation sites on Earth. Hanging along the great cliff faces like shelf-fungi on massive tree stumps, stark white megastructures serve as breeding grounds and surrogate habitats for countless species. Some are breeding programs helping species that just barely survived Hell Day rebuild their numbers. Others are lazurogenesis programs looking to resurrect species driven to extinction by the apocalypse - often making extensive use of banked genomes stored in vaults on the Lunar surface. And others still are neogenesis projects, assigned to the somewhat grim task of engineering new organisms to live on a permanently-changed Earth. And through it all, Darw.in has been at the helm, his systems routinely upgraded and expanded, his presence everywhere in the archipelago whether as a hologram, an arspace sprite or an android, and his attentions multifaceted. Beyond simply preserving the heritage of the Galapagos, he’s made some improvements of his own, in the form of “pet projects'', such as uplifting finches with human-level hive consciousness, and conversing with cognitively-enhanced tortoises to gift the universe with their uniquely-slow perspective on the world. And then there’s Darw.in’s more broad interest in natural selection, studying the animals and plants which made it through Hell Day and seeing how they adapt, as well as the stranger phenomenon on the new Earth, such as nanites in sea water - once upon a time deployed to feed on microplastics, now radiating into peculiar new niches, as wild non-biotic life forms, not unlike himself.

All this, sponsored by Biocare corporate philanthropy, is one of the more positive examples of a land on Earth revitalized by private interests from the Lunar Covenant.

And then there’s Easter Island. Which one would be forgiven for mistaking for Martian propaganda.

Founded in 2004, Deciduous Technologies (“DecTec”) was the largest producer and distributor of VR and AR experiences and interfaces on Luna by 2040. However, antitrust legislation saw DecTec dismembered in 2082, with the largest surviving fragment rebranding as Parbex Entertainment Group. Through downsizing, lawsuits and the Hail, Parbex survived by being the largest distributor of virch porn on Luna, thanks to its iron grip on a controlling share of XMUNDO, a literal world of erotic geography, composed of microtransactions plugged directly into the pleasure center of the user’s brain. No matter how bad things got on the moon, Selenites were still willing to pay for orgasms. Parbex played a very minor, somewhat obscure role in the rise of the Lunar Covenant, and for his patronage, Parbex’s CEO, the quasi-immortal Galen Alensky (born 2001, died 2069, reborn as a digital lifeform 2069) has always been granted the hushed favor of the Covenant’s leadership. And it was under this pretense that Parbex’s expedition to Easter Island was sponsored by the Covenant’s Ministry of Terrestrial Heritage, beginning in 2198. Parbex Presents: Easter Island.

And now, without further ado, let us skip a short 187 years into the future. It’s bad, but it’s not that bad. Okay it is. Your eyes probably caught the third sentence of the next line after this paragraph, you know what’s coming. Oh dear, no, I did not mean for that to be a pun. But what else are you gonna do? Hit that little X button on the tab and go do something else? Wait, no, don’t do that! AAAAAAAAA

Oh good, you didn’t click off just yet. Ahem. Easter Island’s covered in porn.

Alright, not really (you saw this, it’s the only reason you continued reading, breaking the fourth wall isn’t as funny as I thought it would be, I’ll stop now). Asking any generic person in 2385 about Easter Island is like asking someone in 2022 what they know about Tessaoua, Niger. “Who?”, they’ll remark, because statistically they’re more likely to live on Mars than on Earth, and were unaware such a place existed until you brought it up to them. But if they’re even a little bit aware of small islands on Planet Earth, they’ll know that it’s “covered in porn”. They’re not aware of any of its rich history or culture, just this crass factoid. But of course, this is a silly and, by definition, uninformed appraisal of the situation on Easter Island. The truth is far sillier.

First, the good. Parbex moved 524 submerged moai statues further inland to higher elevations. Additionally, the extinct Rapa Nui Palm was reintroduced to the island. Well, a similar-enough palm, anyway. More on them later. The island was also made one landmass again thanks to aggressive land-reclamation projects linking the short-lived archipelago together, using lots and lots of concrete and rock from the Andes. Indeed, the island’s principal settlement, Hanga Roa, was raised from the sea, albeit on big ugly concrete slabs; today, it serves as the primary harbor, airport and spaceport to the island. And with that, we reach the end of Parbex’s good deeds.

As part of a collaborative effort with the Covenant Ministry of Terran Heritage, Parbex has recreated pre-colonial Rapa Nui as an immersive experience of mixed augmented-reality, virtual-reality and android actors. On the surface, Rapa Nui seems like any ordinary tropical island with creepy stone statues on it, but this belies a layer of arspace overlaying every inch of the island, which can be seen either with ocular prosthesis or proprietary AR glasses. Central processing for this great simulation is run from facilities dug deep into Ma′unga Terevaka, the island’s largest volcano and geothermal power source for most of the data-heavy operations on the island, although for an enterprise of this scale, the island’s entire environment has been tailored in service to it.

Those palm trees I mentioned earlier? While superficially similar in size and appearance to the extinct Rapa Nui Palm, on the inside, they’re quite different. Engineered with organic biocircuitry, neurocellulose, BPV cells (biophotovoltaic) and other cybernetic innovations, some of these traits are with the tree from before it’s even a seed, others are installed surreptitiously when it’s a sapling, and others are installed at later stages in the tree’s life cycle and regularly updated and maintained by the island’s staff. Some palms on Easter Island are cybernetic solar-energy collectors, others act as part of a distributed server network, some are projectors and arspace nodes, some are device recharging stations for visitors, some are security systems. Great care has been put into obscuring the synthetic elements of these trees, where the line isn’t simply blurred; non-experts aren’t able to discern what any given tree is actually there for. Every tree on the island has a role to play, and is part of a carefully-planned network spanning the entire island. Other computation systems are seamlessly integrated into the local scenery as rocks, hills, even some of the famous statues on the island are in fact replicas with various computer systems on the inside.

With this multifaceted technosystem at Parbex’s disposal, one can bear witness to an ultra-realistic recreation of Ancient Rapa Nui. More than a simple visual overlay across your field of vision, you’ll experience the sounds, smells and even textures of this lost world, recreated to precise historical accuracy in AR, VR and RL. The sprites in this arspace recreate a harrowing tale of ecological destruction and violence. Visit the stone village of Orongo along the caldera of Rano Kau, and see the moai crafted in real time - even participate yourself. Take a journey to the sunken island of Motu Nui. Long submerged beneath the waves, Parbex built a pressurized dome over this small rocky island, site of the rituals of the Bird Man cult. Descending down to the islet, the entire space inside the dome is filled by synthetic sunlight and the empty blue sky painted by billions of microscopic diodes. Seated in a circle, visitors with wired DNIs can experience with their own nervous system the trials of the Hopu and the world’s deadliest egg hunt. In addition to the arspace ambiance, there are many opportunities for visitors to dive into these sorts of virch experiences - rowing the first canoe to arrive on the island, erecting the moai, tearing them down, meeting the Europeans. All of these experiences will feel as real as the reality you already take for granted. Most visitors do not even visit Easter Island, but plug their nervous systems into machines back on Luna, and partake in the island via virch servers located on the island. In-person visitors to the island can actually interact with these virtual tourists, via augmented reality, allowing for mixed tourism parties - and making it so family members who for whatever reason couldn’t leave Luna for the family vacation on Easter Island, can still tag along, or at least, can for as long as the satellites are all lined up.

Now, there was some artistic license taken with Parbex’s recreation of Easter Island. In the physical realm, the reclaimed land was built with a bit of an artistic flair. And in the immaterial realm, Easter Island’s virch and arspace is filled with strange creatures and spirits from Polynesian myth, some of which can be filtered out, while others are random encounters even for vanilla tours. In many ways, Parbex’s recreation of Rapa Nui civilization is intended to recreate the mystical, mythological worldviews of the Rapa Nui people, sometimes balancing it with a more objective interpretation, other times veering into outright surreal magic. On Easter Island, layers of reality blur together, and within those layers, there are yet more layers - layers of nerve, mind and matter.

Every character on Easter Island, be they an arspace or virch sprite, or physical android, is a fully-realized, fully-sapient AI with its own personality, modeled after the ancient peoples of Rapa Nui. Depending on your sensory settings, you will feel the warmth of their skin when you shake their hands, and smell their breath when they speak. At the same time, they are more fundamentally not the natives of Rapa Nui, and they know this. Etched into their codes, on servers powered by Terevaka’s faint embers at the very heart of the island, is their fundamental purpose to represent the lives and times of the people of Easter Island, their history and their myths. Their joy and their tragedy. The people they were modeled after are long gone. None of their descendents exist today. They’ll never exist again, and nothing can replace them. All that lives on now, is their memory. And each character is aware that they are a memory. A second-hand memory of a bygone people - archetypes and conjecture, not blood long since washed out to sea. And yet, their purpose remains the sacred charity of immortality for the people of Rapa Nui.

Also, there’s lots of ads. Like, not even a little. A lot. Most are optically integrated into the environment in subtle ways. Your eye doesn’t immediately notice the patterns in the grain of the palm trees, or in the dirt, or in the flames of the village fires. But your brain sure notices them. Subconsciously. Others are smells, faint enough to be just barely detected, but gone at just the right moment to leave you wanting more. Some of the adverts are faint sounds carried on the wind. Advertisements are tailored for proper age demographics, individual native language and other factors. When you know what to sense for, the whole of Parbex Presents: Easter Island appears made of advertisements. Indeed, you’re meant to be led astray by the obvious ones intended to be red herrings and get you off your guard - some are not even for real products. And after over a century, adverts have been incorporated overtly, almost like self-aware theater, in the form of native advertising. For example:

Rapa Nui woman: “The tattoos on my cheeks are called pangaha’a, the tattoos on my hands are called rima kona, and for a limited time, XMUNDO is offering the Diamond Membership Perk.”

Rapa Nui shaman: “Act now and secure your exclusive avatar, Precious Crimson, and a stipend of 1,500 perla.”

Rapa Nui child: “Limited time offer expires in five hours, applicable only on Parbex-affiliated continents. Product rated for adults only.”

As said before, there are many layers of the arspace, which visitors can opt into. Some more surreal than others, some more erotic, others more brightly-colored and child-friendly. Many, many different layers. There are layers to the physical layer as well. There are sexbot versions of every sprite character in Parbex Presents: Easter Island, and one can rent any of them for the duration of their stay, complete with…the works.

But, with any large enterprise like this, there are of course hiccups. Being an island drenched in immersive arspace and holograms, there are of course times where visitors become too engrossed in what they’re doing, trip and fall - sometimes off a cliff. There are bugs in the system, albeit very uncommon ones. Inclimate weather is unfortunately real, and there’s no way to augment away rain or cloudy days. Or at least none that’s practical or cost-effective. There are also artifacts, digital lifeforms emerging from the code to do their own thing, assuming they don’t get deleted by the network’s immune system. And then there’s the mysterious presence known only as “Rona”, appearing infrequently to creep out occasional visitors. Some say he’s the angry spirit of the Rapa Nui people, back from the grave to haunt Parbex Presents: Easter Island. Some say he’s a viral sophware introduced by anti-Covenant activists to sabotage the commodification of Rapa Nui and its history. Some say, it’s all part of the ride, a spook inserted in the system by the company to spice things up.

And then there’s the fate of the moai. The most famous residents of Rapa Nui, her stalwart stone sentries, are today covered with a dense cloud of very overt arspace adverts, for Parbex products and sponsors, including XMUNDO. Removing one’s glasses or opting out one’s optical prosthetics will simply have the arspace ads replaced by an equally-dense cloud of holograms. Parbex Presents: Easter Island has multiple tiers, with the lowest, the Visitor Tier, requiring 100 terras for these particular adverts to be removed from one’s gaze.

Per moai.