Bill walked into the backup booth. It would be his last chance to backup before he left the Bitchun society for a while, evangelising about its merits to outsiders. Despite the obvious benefits of the Bitchun society - no death; everyone ate, drank and had internet access; free energy; the list went on. Normally the Bitchun society just outlived its detractors. That's what it did in the early days, when some people claimed it was wrong to backup and restore. That the new body wasn't in fact the old person, even though they had all the memories and acted just like them. Bill wondered if he'd need this backup. Sometimes missionaries didn't come back. Often they were flat out killed. Rarely they joined the society they were trying to convert. One didn't become a missionary if you were entirely happy with the Bitchun society.
Bill's life flashed before his eyes. This was a perfectly normal part of the backup process. Run the entire life through the active part of the mind and copy. Bill had grown up in the Bitchun society, and had never known the things it had replaced; money, work, death, taxes. These were all alien concepts to him. There were old timers who remembered the change in society, starting with the end of scarcity, and ending in the end of death, but most of these were deadheading. Or founding new Bitchun societies off world. They still needed work, even though some of them had strived to rid the world of work. In the Bitchun society you only strived to be popular. The all-mighty wuffie governed what privileges you got beyond the bare necessities of food, drink, shelter (in the form of a coffin hotel), internet access and medical care in the form of backups. Missionaries had all the wuffie the towns they converted had to give, assuming they came back.
Bill got to the stage where he started being a missionary. His past missions flashed before him. The painful mistakes he made in his first mission, ending with him being run out of town. The blank where his second mission was, presumably they killed that copy of him. Finally, his successful third mission, which he had just got back from. He could lounge around the society for a while, draining the massive whuffie he had gained, but he loved the buzz of being a missionary. The fear of being caught out. The thrill of them accepting a part of the Bitchun society, and then another part. The final pay-off of tons of whuffie. Or being run out of town. That was pretty fun too. There just wasn't any danger in the Bitchun society. Most dangerous things were highly antisocial, so came with a great whuffie cost. This way he could gain whuffie and get the adrenaline rushing.
The town Bill was going to was well established, and had thrown off many missionaries before. All the towns had. The Bitchun society had been going over a hundred years, and many opportunists wanted the massive whuffie that being a missionary gained. Some made the mistake of going in as a missionary. The files on the net made it very clear that this was a good way to get restored from backup and lose 10 years. Unless instructed otherwise the bots rebooted missionaries from backup after 10 years. No, the best way to go in was to pretend to be someone wanting to join their society, to break free from the Bitchun society. He washed the dyes out of his hair, removed the more obvious tech, removed the body mods. These were fundamentalists he was going to. There were parts of Leviticus that prohibited body mods.
Bill made his way to the town, in an old fashioned car. He had the whuffie to burn real petroleum. He made it to their crude checkpoint and asked his business. He told them that he was sick of the Bitchun society and wanted to know more about Christ. And possibly join their society. He flashed the silver crucifix he'd recently acquired. They let him in and led him to the chaplain. Bill sat through tedious hours of the chaplain's evangelising, smiling and nodding in the right places. Bill impressed the chaplain with his knowledge of the Gospels, which he was referring to in his invisible HUD, searching the quotes he'd recently bookmarked. Now was the time to build friendships, not to push the Bitchun society.
After hours of preaching, Bill recited some lines and took a blessing from the chaplain. They welcomed their new brother into their society, giving him the lodgings of a recently deceased widow. The pace of life was harder in the town. Food had to be grown the hard way, with no genetic engineering, even without robots to help them. Life was hard, and the men were real men, the women were real women, and many other clichés. Bill thought it would almost be a shame to bring them around to the Bitchun society, but he would do it any way. If they loved all their fronter stuff, they'd love colonising a new planet. A lot of ex-outsiders went out in the colonies. There was space in their towns. Space that the Bitchun society didn't have on Earth. With the birthrate slightly above zero, and the deathrate zero there was a bit of a population problem. Naturally, whuffie solved this problem slightly. It was grossly unpopular to have children, so most people didn't. Only those willing to spend years living in coffin complexes, living off the bare minimums the society gave freely to those with no whuffie, had children. In the town every couple had a few children. They didn't have a zero mortality rate after all.
Very slowly and very carefully Bill introduced bits of the Bitchun society to the town. First it was a robot to help with the farming. First he had it on remote control, directly controlling its harvest. They were impressed that he got 3 day's work done in 1 day. The next day Bill gave the controls to another citizen of the town, and showed him how to control it. It took him a bit of getting used to, but he still managed to get 2 days work out of the droid. Later Bill would show them the AI in the droid, that let it tend the field unattended. Bill pointed out that this gave them plenty more time for Bible study. These nuts loved their Bible study. Everything shut down on the Sunday, apart from the small, but well tended, Church. With its awesome stained glass windows and hard pews. Even Bill felt a pang of awe when he went in, every Sunday. In the Spring, Bill swapped their seed for his GM seed in the robot's hopper. If they didn't know about it then they couldn't object. And they could hardly complain about a bumper harvest, which was almost guaranteed from the supplier.
Time went by and Bill integrated well into society. He even flirted with one of the locals, but with their "no sex before marriage" customs nothing came of it. He certainly wasn't going to marry someone who would almost certainly become a colonist. Deadheading through the boring parts of space travel, setting up new colonies, moving on to the next colony. That life wasn't for him. He was a missionary, and he enjoyed what he did. Everyone enjoyed what they did in the Bitchun society. Robots did all the boring jobs. Time went by and Bill introduced more bits of the Bitchun society. Curing death would be a hard one. These people believed in the soul, in the afterlife. What happens to the soul if you were dead and then brought back to life? Bill talked this over with the chaplain, who thought that the copy must have no soul, so was not a real person. The real person died the first time their body died and went on to the afterlife. The copied body with the copied memories was not a real person. If they had the numbers they would wage holy war on the Bitchun society, but they didn't and would get squashed. Bill knew that he would have his work cut out here.
Everywhere in the town Bill talked to people about curing death, and everywhere he met the same opinion. Only the original person, born to a man and woman, was a real person with an immortal soul. Copies were demon spawn, grown in vats, engineered to be exactly the age you wanted to be when you came out of the simulation from your latest backup. Bill faked knowing a bit of medicine to get to the deathly sick. He used his portable backup generator on them. He never got the opportunity to use the backups.
The town had regular trading contacts with the other nearby outsider towns. Thanks to Bill's robot and GM crops they had a bumper harvest, and had plenty left over for trade. This was fortunate since the other towns had a poor harvest this year. True, it made things a bit easier for the Bitchun society if the outsider towns died off, but they'd rather that they joined the society. This is one reason why they didn't declare war on the outsider towns. Another reason was that there wasn't much of an army to speak of. After all, wars are very unpopular. Not much whuffie in forming an army. One day, a trader came from the neighbouring Muslim town. Religion wasn't banned in the Bitchun society, but it wasn't popular. Mankind had acieved many of the things religion had promised. For all intents and purposes, the Bitchun society was paradise. An angry gate keeper walked the visitor into town, looking for Bill.
"Bill! I never knew you had a brother." The gate keeper said, approaching Bill.
"I'm not..." the other Bill started.
"Bill! Run!" Bill shouted.
Bill and what looked remarkably like Bill ran out of town. The townspeople realised that Bill, their Bill, who they had welcomed into their society was a soulless clone. They grabbed all tools that could possibly be used as weapons and gave chase. This took a little time,and the Bills took the head start. They made it back to civilisation in one piece, leaving the problem of there being two Bills, each with a valid claim to being the real Bill.
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