[ix]
DIS WAS EVERYWHERE. The B&B crew couldn’t get enough of her. They touched in to speak to her all over the building. Even with all the compute-time, she had to queue them, calling them as they walked in the woods or lazed in the common-room.
But she always had time for Iceweasel.
“How’s CC coming?” Iceweasel said.
Dis didn’t have a blinking cursor anymore, but Iceweasel still could read body-language into her pauses. This one was awkward. “Not good. I’ve been trying to talk him through, but he doesn’t want to stabilize. With me it was a matter of finding the possibility space where I could deal with being a head-in-a-jar. It may be that CC doesn’t have that subset.”
“What? It’s CC! He loves this stuff! It’s what he lived for! That’s like a rocket-scientist with a fear of heights!”
“I don’t know a lot of aerospace dudes, but one reason to get into uploading is your overwhelming existential terror at the thought of dying. It’s not a discipline you’d chase if you were uninterested in the subject.”
Iceweasel tried to learn to relax. The B&B didn’t need that much work to keep going. A chart making the rounds in their social-spaces showed how if everyone put in an eight-hour shift every three days, they’d have double the hours they needed. One crew was ideologically committed to doing nothing, creating a “safe space” for “post-work.” She understood. Sitting on her ass, especially in public, made her feel guilty. Unworkers were moral cover for people experimenting with doing SFO for a day or a month (or a year).
She sat on a lounger on B&B’s lawn, a big field of sweet-smelling wild-grasses with a thriving biome of critters that rustled and soared around it. She had Dis in both ears, but her system was smart enough to mix in wind-through-grass sound, things chasing each other, yin-yang of breezy aimlessness and panicked scrambling.
“How long before you can stabilize CC?”
Another micro-pause. Dis had lots of compute-time. The pauses had to be deliberate. She’d ask Gretyl – comp-sci was a mystery to her, despite hanging around the university crew.
“Don’t know if I’ll be able to. When I figured how to stabilize myself, I concluded I’d be able to apply the technique to every sim. But I’m a data-set of one. People are idiosyncratic. I’m idiosyncratic. Maybe I’m a rare exception and no one else will do what I’ve done.”
“That’s not what you said—”
“It’s what all the people who know what they’re fucking talking about are saying now. Everyone else is running around shouting, ‘Death is cured! USA! USA! USA!’”
“This is Canada.”
“Yeah, but you sound stupid chanting ‘Ca-na-da!’ It’s easy to get excited when science actually does something, because science is failing and taking notes. We want to get a ‘breakthrough,’ but not everything is a breakthrough. Sometimes, it’s just a tiny step forward. Or a dead end. I’m trying to bring CC up, but maybe the only way to wake him is in a state so distorted that he’s not recognizable. I’ve modeled using me as a template and mixing our models one bit at a time until we get to a hybrid, with just enough me in to keep him alive. There’s no clean way to do that. Nearly everything I tried modeled out to nothing recognizable as either of us. Interesting as that is, I have no urge to make insane, immortal synthetic personalities out of thin air. We’ve got enough fucking weirdos.”
“What about everyone else? The other researchers?”
Dis made a rude noise. “There were real fuckups in Madrid, who brought up a version of me, tried to make me help them. That copy suicided, after sending messages to all the other groups, telling them about the evil shit going down. But Madrid’s the only lab that’s succeeding in bringing a sim up into a stable state. I’ve been thinking of giving everyone else permission to experiment with bringing versions of me online, creepy as that is. Seems it might be the only way of getting anywhere. Science is lumpy. Success sometimes follows success, but sometimes you get mold in the petri dish over the weekend and spend your life trying to figure out what just happened.”
Another pause.
“I’m guessing there’s a ton of instances of me running in default. Zottas and their lab-rats wouldn’t have any problem with that. Used to drive CC nuts, the sense that they added our research to theirs, but we never saw what they made of our work. But every time we had any success, their lab-rats were tempted to go walkaway and join us, because everyone wants to work for winners. So at least all my twins are acting as irresistible temptation to fire your boss and hit the road.”
“Do you wonder if you’re in a default lab, being tricked about the world around you?”
Computerized laughter. Gretyl said Dis had had a really weird laugh in life. The bizarre computer laugh was a faithful rendition. She must have been as weird as shoes on a snake. “No way. Too many Turing tests to pass. I’m conversing with all of you all the time. They could fuck with my ability to detect whether I was conversing with a bot or not, but that would also make me too stupid to be helpful. I’m as sure that I know what’s sim and what’s reality now as I was when I was meat-alive. Call it ninety-five percent.”
“What’s the other five percent?”
“An old A.I. not-joke. In the future we’ll figure out how to simulate everything, so we will. There will be a lot more simulated universes in the whole history of the real universe than there will be real universes. So it’s more likely that you’re a sim than real, whatever real means.”
“My brain hurts.”
“Don’t worry, when we simulate you, we’ll ensure you’re in a state that’s comfortable with the idea. Ha-ha-only-serious. It’s like Meta, being like this. Sometimes I dial back and watch the lookaheads, see how close I am to the edge of full panic. It’s interesting to tweak that shit in realtime. You haven’t known freedom until you’ve experienced cognitive liberty, the right to choose your state of mind.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“You’re being sarcastic, but seriously, not being embodied is awesome. If the clone stuff they’re doing in Lagos works out, I’ll be the first to jump back into a body, but I’ll miss this. There’s something pure about it. It’s much simpler than psychotherapy, and more effective.”
“Unless you’re CC.”
“Different strokes for different sims.” She could make the computer-voice sound smug.
Iceweasel found being a head in a jar dangerously compelling then. It would be wonderful to dial back her anxieties, match her intellectual knowledge that no one was waiting for her to show her true zotta colors with emotional certainty that everyone knew she was a fraud. If she went to therapy to make that match happen, she’d be lionized for her self-knowledge, but if she took a drug that did it, she’d be escaping reality. She wondered how people would think about sims who dispensed with drugs and therapy.
“I can’t stand just sitting,” she muttered, looking at the worknots, proudly lazing. “I need to do something.”
“We also serve, who sit and fart.” It made Iceweasel smile.
“Of all the things I thought when I went walkaway, I never anticipated chatting with a potty-mouthed simulated neuroscientist.”
“I’m a real neuroscientist.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m going to start a program of micro-correcting people searching for correct adjectives to describe dead immortal simulated artificial people like me.”
“Don’t you have some research you should be doing?”
“I’m doing it, running a long lookahead for this conversation and branch-stemming/pruning to find paths to ongoing dialog. Trying to simulate what you were doing when I kept suiciding, before I stabilized. I’m back-forming hypotheses from my transcripts and trying them on you.”
Iceweasel squirmed. “Why?”
“I want to generalize a data-driven solution to cheering people the fuck up. I could apply it to sims like CC.”
“This isn’t cheering me up.”
“I think it is.”
Iceweasel felt a moment’s software-like introspection. “Okay, I am cheering up a little.”
“Good. Noted.” The computer-voice assayed a German-like diction: “Lie down on ze couch und tell me about your parintz.”