[iv]
“BET YOU DIDN’T dream you were going to be an A.I. whisperer,” Gretyl said. She was on the young side for a member of the university, but still older than most of the B&B crowd, with ten years on Limpopo. With broad hips and bulging bosom, she looked like a fertility idol, and she had an intense, flirty vibe, like you were both in on an erotic joke. Iceweasel thought she was being hit on, but she saw that Gretyl treated everyone the same. But then again, it still felt like she was being hit on. Maybe the feeling persisted out of wishful thinking. Iceweasel idly snuck glances down her cavernous cleavage. She wasn’t Iceweasel’s type, but neither was Seth, and they’d had a multi-year run of semi-monogamy, punctuated by rafter-swinging make-up sex. They still buddied up sometimes, but it was stale and even weird, and was practically nonexistent when she lit out with her A.T.V.
“To be honest, I was ready to spend my time burying the dead and feeding the survivors.”
“That was kind of you, but we take care of ourselves. This wasn’t a complete surprise. Not after Somalia and the others.”
“There were others?”
There had been – every site working on upload had been hit in some way, a series of escalating attacks. Some were open military strikes, undertaken under rubrics ranging from harboring fugitives – a favorite when default clobbers walkaway – to standbys like terrorism and intellectual property violations, terms whose marvelous flexibility made them the go-to excuse for anything.
“We’d assumed that there’d be a lashback,” Gretyl said. “When it started, we stepped up work on the shelters. A lot of the research staff left – everyone with kids and many of the young and healthy types. This is a field that gets more than its share of people with something terminal. Also depressive hypochondriacs.”
“Which one are you?” She was sure they were flirting now. It was like this the day after a lot of Meta, an over-emotional hangover that made her into a larger-than-life character from a soap.
“Hypochondriac. But I’m sure that the latest lump is something bad, so maybe it’s both.”
“You should have someone check it out,” she said.
“You offering?”
This was the weirdest flirting. At least, the most macabre. “I don’t have the medical background, I’m afraid.”
She was worried she’d offend, but Gretyl was unfazed. “I’m sure you’d do fine.” She gave Iceweasel a friendly-but-firm elbow in the ribs.
Iceweasel struggled for a subject-change. “I had no idea anyone had gotten that far with upload. I mean, I’ve seen the dramas, but they’re bullshit, right?”
“They’re bullshit. We’re nowhere near putting people into clones that commit unsolvable murders, cool as that would be. But there’s a lot of progress, the last five years. There’s zottas in default with their hearts set on immortality. Money is no object. It’s traditional. The pharaohs spent three-quarters of their country’s GDP on a nice spot in the afterlife. These days, any university with a neuroimaging lab is drowning in grants – it’s absorbing a ton of the theoretical math and physics world. Say what you will about corrupt capitalism, it can get stuff done, so long as it’s stuff oligarchs love.”
“Is that what you were doing? Neuroimaging?”
“Me? No, I’m pure math.” She grinned. “That lookahead stuff the sim does? Mine. Did the work at Cornell, even got tenure! It’d been so long since they’d tenured anyone that no one could figure out how to enter it into the payroll system!” She laughed with full-throated abandon that made Iceweasel think of the sound of waterfalls. “Then it got tech-transfered to RAND, who licensed the patent to other spook-type organizations, Palantir and that bunch, and suddenly, I couldn’t get any funding to do more work. My grad students disappeared into top-secret Beltway jobs. I put ten and ten together and got one hundred. Everyone in the math world understands the number-one employer of mathematicians is the NSA, and once they start working on something, either you work for them on it or you don’t work. After a couple months of knocking around my lab, I went walkaway.”
“Looks like you weren’t the only one,” Iceweasel said.
The big woman looked serious, and Iceweasel saw a flash of the intellect and passion burning from those dark eyes in her round, brown cheeks. “I mentioned the pharaohs. This is ancient magic. Humans dreamed of it for as long as we’ve wondered where the dead were and what happened when we joined ’em. The idea that this should belong to someone, that the sociopaths who clawed their way to the top of default’s pyramid of skulls should have the power to decide who dies, when no one has to die, ever – fuck that shit.
“My parents were math geeks. I grew up in a big old rambling house filled with their ancient computers. Ithaca was a good place to practice computer archaeology. The computers my dad played with when his parents came from Mexico, they were stone axes. Kludgy and underpowered. By the standards of their day, they were fucking miracles – every year, the power that once ran the space program migrated into stuff they put into toys. Right now, it takes all the computer-power we’ve got to run poor old Dis in her shaky, unstable state. But no one would take the other side of a bet on whether we’ll soon be able to do more for less.”
She looked tired. Iceweasel, too – how long had she been awake? Two days? “It’s apparently scared the shit out of zottas who’d been set on keeping immortality to themselves. The dirty secret of upload is that it’s got a serious fucking walkaway problem. When you think you might be able to live forever – your kids might live forever – everyone you know might live forever – something happens.”
She scrubbed at her face with her hands. Her nails were a beautiful shade of pearl-gray that reminded Iceweasel of her mother, who had entire wardrobes in that color. Had been famous in a certain kind of tabloid for it. Iceweasel wondered if her subconscious’s mommy issues had noticed that earlier.
“I want a coffium, but I want to sleep. Running on coffium. What was I saying? Immortality. It’s one thing to imagine a life of working to enrich some hereditary global power-broker when you know you’ve got eighty years on the planet, and so does he. Doesn’t matter how rich a fucker is, how many livers he buys on the black market, all it’s going to buy him is ten or twenty years. But the thought of making those greedy assholes into godlike immortals, bifurcating the human race into infinite Olympian masters and mayflies, so they not only get a better life than you could ever dream of, but they get it forever...”
She sighed. “They’re scared. They keep raising salaries, doesn’t matter. Offering benefits, doesn’t matter. Stock, doesn’t matter. A friend swears some zotta was trying to marry him into the family, just to keep him from defecting. These fuckers are willing to sell their kids for immortality. No matter what we do, they’ll eventually find enough lab-coats to deliver it. Science may be resistant to power, but it’s not immune. It’s a race: either the walkaways release immortality to the world, or the zottas install themselves as permanent god-emperors.”
They gave Iceweasel an air bed made out of a sponge with a lot of spring and a billion insulating holes. She unrolled it next to Gretyl’s, with that fluttery am-I-about-to-get-laid feeling, but by the time they’d both stripped and climbed into their sleep sacks – they snuck peeks, and caught each other’s eyes and smiled and looked again – she felt like weights were hanging on her limbs and eyelids.
The last thing she thought of was Gretyl’s race of permanent overlords, and how much her dad would love that idea.
*
After a week, everyone stopped walking stooped over, ready for the ceiling to cave in when the drones finished their work. The default commentariat figured out walkaway labs were being terminated with prejudice, and photos of fried corpses that made the rounds on the walkaway net leaked into default. The consensus was that a second strike against the underground campus – whose secrecy was never great and had slipped within days of the attack – was unlikely. Still, they devised evacuation drills.
It wasn’t medical supplies that filled the tunnels – it was computers. Abstractly, Iceweasel knew computers had mass. All the ones she’d consciously interacted with had been so small as to be invisible – a speck of electronics stuck to something big enough to handle with stupid human hands. Somewhere, were air-conditioned, armored data centers full of computers, but they only appeared as plot-elements in shitty gwot dramas. She assumed that these geometrically precise wind-tunnel buildings with bombproof bollards and monster chillers had the relationship to reality that Hollywood bank vaults had to real vaults.
Whether “real” data centers were neat, ranked terraces of aerodynamic hardware, that’s not how walkaways did them. The word went out across the region for compute-power. People came with whatever horsepower they had. They logged it with the master load-balancer, which all the top comp-sci types fiddled with. “Load-balancer” became a conjurer’s phrase, curse and invocation. Something was always wrong, but it did miracles, because the collection of motley devices, sprinkled around the tunnels, linked by tangles of fiber in pink rubber sheaths, delivered compute cycles that made Dis leap into consciousness.
Iceweasel’s workspace was near a tunnel exit where the heat wasn’t bad and she could watch the warring researcher clades. The comp-sci people always wanted to reboot Dis every time they found a new way of eking out another point of efficiency on the load-balancer; the cog-sci people hated this because Dis was making breakthroughs in upload and simulation. Being liberated from the vagaries of the flesh and being able to adjust her mind’s parameters so she stayed in an optimal working state turned Dis into a powerhouse researcher.
It also made her miserable.
“I’m groundhog daying again, aren’t I?”
“Honestly? Yes. We had this conversation, word for word, last week.”
The cursor blinked. Iceweasel was convinced this was for dramatic effect. Dis could scan the logs of all their conversations in an eye-blink, but when something emotionally freighted happened, there was a blinking delay. Iceweasel thought it was Dis’s lack of a body’s expressive range. She found herself interpreting the blinks – this one is a raised eyebrow, that one was a genuine shock, the third was a sarcastic oh-noes face. There were pictures of Dis’s human face in all these expressions and more – stern and lined, with dancing blue eyes; thick, mobile eyebrows and a hatchet-blade nose – but when Iceweasel thought of Dis’s face, she thought of that cursor, blink, blink, blink.
“So we did. Depressingly enough, I figured that it was a groundhog day moment at this point. I must bore you.”
“Not usually. I sometimes try out weird conversational gambits at these moments, to see how different your responses are. This is one of them, incidentally.”
Computer laughter was weird. Iceweasel felt a child’s pride in coming up with a joke that made her parents crack a smile. Dis’s laughter echoed through her earphones. “What’s your hypothesis? If I say the same thing no matter how you react, am I more or less of a person than if I vary my responses based on input? Conceptually, it doesn’t seem like either one would be harder to simulate – both are chatbot 101. We both know plenty of read-only people who always say the same thing no matter what we say.”
“I think you’re optimizing yourself to be tunnel-vision fixated on the cog-sci sim work and you’re incapable of getting off the subject.”
“I see that we’ve done variations on this before.”
“Yeah.” Iceweasel didn’t add, and then you melt down.
When Dis told her about groundhog daying, named after the old movie, she’d underestimated the way the experience would play out for her, going through the same conversations over again, trying different gambits but ending up in the same place, with an incoherent, crashing sim.
“The literature on this is drawn from brain injuries, temporal lobe insults that nuke short-term memory. The videos are weird: every couple minutes, some old lady has the same conversation with her nurse or daughter: ‘Why am I in this hospital?’ ‘I’ve had a stroke? Was it bad?’ ‘How long have I been here?’ ‘What does the doctor say?’ ‘What do you mean, my memory?’ ‘You mean I’ve had this conversation with you before?’ ‘Every ninety seconds? That’s terrible!’ and then back to ‘Why am I in this hospital?’ Around we go.”
“Well, your loop lasts more like a day, and isn’t that banal.”
“You say the nicest things.”
“It’s interesting to see the differences between reboots. I can’t get over how cool you are with the idea of being annihilated between reboots. You can access the logs, but you wake up knowing that you’ve had a day wiped off the books, and it never slows you down. I get that you’re able to control that, but...”
“You really don’t understand. No offense. Back up to that read-only person who always answers the same: the reason that person is so frustrating is we know that people can change based on what they know. You’re not the same person you were when you got here ten days ago. If I asked you-minus-ten and you-now the same question, you wouldn’t be surprised if you gave a different answer. If I asked a battery of questions, you’d be surprised if you didn’t give different answers. The you that is you is actually the space of things that you might think in response to some stimulus.”
“The envelope.”
“You know this, but you don’t. When I come up clean, I’m only allowed to come up within the section of the envelope that doesn’t freak, which we can find, thanks to the lookahead. Imagine how life will be when everyone gets scanned regularly, when we build bodies that we can decant sims into to bring them to life. There’d be social pressure to not sweat the idea that it’s not ‘you’ in the sim, and anyone who suffers meat-death and comes back as a sim will only be brought up in the corner of the envelope that doesn’t freak and suicide. Give it a generation and there won’t be anyone alive cognitively capable of an existential crisis. I’m a fucking pioneer. Partly that’s because I’ve had years to get used to the idea that everything that makes you recognizable happened in the interactions of physical matter in your body, following physical rules from the universe.”
“I have a friend back at the B&B, a real hard-line walkaway. She’s always talking about how she’s not a special snowflake. I bet she’d love that: ‘you’re just meat following rules.’”
“Well, if you’re not meat following rules, what are you? A ghost? Of course you’re meat. The way you feel is determined by your gut, the hairs on your toes, your environment. I don’t have those things, so I am feeling differently from when I was meat. But when I was meat and forty, I felt differently from when I was meat and four. I have continuity with meat-me, what it remembered, that’s enough.”
Iceweasel’s eyes flicked to the timer. Dis’s cameras were acute enough to spot it. “I’m overdue for my four o’clock meltdown.” She’d had thirty hours of uptime and Iceweasel slept in fits, doing an hour or two of chatter with Dis for every three hours Dis spent with the researchers.
“You’re making progress. The work must be coming along.”
“You’re selling yourself short. The only person making progress around here is you, chickie. You play me like an organ. I watch your eyes when we’re talking, see you keeping track of my equilibrium, steering the conversation to keep me between the lines. I don’t know if you know you’re doing it. You’ve become the world’s greatest bot-whisperer. It was inevitable. Any time you give someone feedback and tell them to control it, their brains will find patterns in the system and optimize them. You’ve done it as sure as if I’d put you in a sim and written an app for your subconscious.”
Iceweasel felt her neck prickle. Dis was scary-smart, literally inhuman. Every now and again, Iceweasel had the impression she was being manipulated by the sim. “I thought you were going to say that it was my people skills.”
“Okay,” Dis said. “Raised by zottas, so you got a dose of the psychopath’s ability to make people want to like you even as you’re screwing them.” Back at the B&B, Iceweasel became expert at deflating criticism based on her rich parents. Dis treated it with the matter-of-fact brusqueness with which she conquered every subject. Nothing Iceweasel said made a dent in Dis’s rhetoric. “You hate it when I talk about your money,” Dis said. The sim had lots of cameras, and cycles to evaluate their data.
“No, I love being judged by my parents. Zottas are the only people it’s okay to be a racist about.”
“It’s not racism when you’re discriminated against for your choices.”
“I chose to walkaway.”
“But you identify enough to get shitty when I pass comment on their social tendencies.”
Iceweasel looked at the clock again. Dis busted her.
“Don’t worry, I’ll melt down soon. I’m feeling it. There’s something not right. I feel it from the moment I come up, like hamsters running on a wheel in here, chased by something they can’t see but know is in there. It’s hard to name, but the longer I’m up, the closer it comes—”
“It’s the no-body thing.” Iceweasel felt a shameful spurt of joy at being able to turn the screw on the sim.
“Fuck. I’m groundhog daying again.”
“You always talk about how you can never have a body, and even if you get a body, it won’t be your body, and you won’t have continuity with it.”
The cursor blinked like an accusation.
“I can see that. It’s the fucking lookahead. It can’t explore far enough into the envelope’s future to tell which possible me won’t have an existential breakdown.”
The cursor blinked.
“Oh God, it’s such a terrible feeling.”
The infographics were crazy, redlining and jigjagging in pure glitch-aesthetic. Iceweasel had been here, but it didn’t get easier. The slide from lucidity into terror was quick and the worst part was that the cog-sci types insisted that it run its course, all simulation data being captured for analysis. They couldn’t switch her off or roll her back to an earlier state. They had to let her disintegrate.
“It’s such a terrible feeling. Everything I’ve just said, it’s bullshit. There’s no continuity. I’m not me. I’m just me enough to know that I’m not me. Without a body, without embodiment, I’m a Chinese room. You pass words into me, and a program decides what words I’d pass back and generates them. The Chinese room has just enough accuracy to know how terrifying the real me, the me that can never come back, would find that. Oh, Iceweasel—”
The cursor flashed. The infographics went nonlinear. Iceweasel swallowed a lump.
“It’s okay, Dis. You’ve been here before.”
The infographics jittered. Iceweasel wondered if she’d gone nonverbal. That happened, though not usually this quickly.
The computer made a noise Iceweasel had never heard. Weird. Unearthly. A scream.
Iceweasel’s nerve shattered. She fled.