5 - transitional phase
[i]
THE FIRST THING Etcetera said: “This wasn’t what I expected.”
Kersplebedeb whooped and Gretyl smiled and rubbed her eyes.
“Welcome back, buddy.”
“Am I dead?”
“That,” Kersplebedeb said, “is the million-dollar question.”
“Why only a million?”
“It’s not inflation-adjusted. I’m a walkaway hippie, can’t be bothered to keep track of money.”
“I feel—” The voice stopped. There was a long pause. Gretyl looked at the infographics, saw the processor loads spiking across the cluster. She’d downloaded the latest lookahead patches and they were supposed to radically reduce loading, but their performance so far had been unimpressive. But then, they’d had to recruit 30 percent more compute-time to get Etcetera running than they’d banked on, and so maybe he was an outlier. That was the problem of optimizing all simulation using a single sample – Dis – for benchmarks.
“You feel?” she prompted, shooting a look at Kersplebedeb to stop him quipping, which he did when he was stressed and holy shit, had he ever been stressed since they’d started this project.
“Numb, I guess. Seriously, am I dead? I mean the me that was made of meat and skin, is that body dead?”
“That body is dead,” Gretyl said. “Murdered.”
“Executed,” Kersplebedeb said.
“Shit.”
The infographics went crazy.
“I can see you’re freaking,” Gretyl said. “That’s understandable. You’d wouldn’t be you if this news wasn’t upsetting. But the numbness, that’s the sim, it’s trying to keep you from going nonlinear. It’s damping your reactions. There’s a danger you’ll end up in a feedback loop where you get more damped, which makes you feel weirder, which triggers further damping.”
“What do I do about it?”
“We’re still figuring it out. You’re a beta-tester.” She didn’t want to think about what would happen when they told him Limpopo was gone. If they told him. No, definitely when. “But we’re hoping it’s one of those things where if you know it’s happening, you can inoculate yourself. Recognize it. Like cognitive behavioral therapy. Realize you’re freaking, and the thing you’re freaking about is the fact that you’re freaking.”
“You’re asking me to take deep breaths?”
“Without the breathing part,” Kersplebedeb said.
Gretyl shot him a look.
“I feel like I’m breathing.”
That’s good, Gretyl thought. Iceweasel’s notes from Dis’s awakening said introspection about sensations of embodiment correlated with metastable cognition. She missed Iceweasel so much. Reading her notes was like chewing glass. The local instance of Dis that shared time on Etcetera’s cluster tried several times to make contact with her sister at Jacob Redwater’s house, but hadn’t reached her.
“You should be able to feel it. It’s a basic part of the sim, feeding ‘all clear’ data to your autonomous nervous system. It’s a replay attack against it, running a loop of everything at the time you were scanned.”
“That would explain why I’m thirsty. I remember when I sat down, I really wanted a drink, I had cotton mouth for the whole scan. Feels like just a few minutes ago.” The infographics showed emergent stability, fewer oscillations, more green bars and blossoming charts.
“Seems like you’re calming.”
“I guess I am. I feel calm, but weird. Still numb. It’s—”
They waited.
“It’s scary, Gretyl. I’m dead. I’m inside a box. When I wasn’t like this, I could play word-games about whether this was death, but Gretyl, I’m dead. It’s weird. Back when I was alive, I thought the problem with being a sim – in a sim? Am I a sim or in a sim? Shit. I thought the problem would be the conviction that you were alive. Now I see it’s the opposite. I know I’m dead. I still feel like me, but not alive me. Why didn’t I ever talk to Dis about this? Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’m dead, Gretyl.”
“Dis is here, if you want to talk to her. She helped prep your sim. The cluster’s ad hoc so we weren’t sure if there’d be enough capacity to run both of you, but if you want to talk to her, we can boot her.”
“A native guide. Like the guy who takes Dante through Hell.”
“Virgil,” Kersplebedeb said. “Did you ever see the Nigerian anime? It was amazing.”
To Gretyl’s surprise, Etcetera laughed. “I can’t imagine.”
“I’ll find a copy. It used to be way seeded on walkaway net, a classic of its kind.”
“What kind?”
“Nigerian animated epic poetry. They did a series on the Norse sagas. And Gilgamesh.”
“You’re shitting me.”
Kersplebedeb laughed. “I’m shitting you. There’s no such thing as Nigerian anime, far as I know. But wouldn’t that be awesome? We should invent it.”
“Wouldn’t we need to be Nigerian?”
“There’s plenty of walkaways in Nigeria. We’ll find collaborators.”
“Guys?”
“Sorry, Gretyl.”
Kersplebedeb squeezed her hand. “You doing okay?”
Gretyl and Etcetera said “Yes” at the same moment, laughed together. It felt like talking to him on a voice-link, not to his spirit beyond the grave. The moment passed.
“You know the weirdest thing?”
“What?”
“I want to talk to my parents. Last couple years, we’ve hardly spoken. It’s not like we don’t get along, I love them, but we had less and less to say. They’d tell me what they were doing, getting petitions signed or ringing doorbells to get voters out for some election everyone knew was gerrymandered to five nines. I’d tell them about some walkaway thing, working on the B&B, it was like I was describing some movie they’d never see – a Nigerian anime epic poem. They nodded along, but I could tell they weren’t following. I was making mouth-noises.
“But now I’m dead, I feel this urgent need to talk to them. I don’t have a message from beyond the grave. I want to hear their voices...” The infographics were inscrutable. He was thinking hard. Things were spiking so much that she worried he was in a race condition and they’d have to restart him, but then: “This feels... temporary. Like I could be erased any moment. Like I’ve been given another day of life, to clear up my business, before I’m gone. Before I go away forever, I want to talk to my parents.”
“Oh,” Gretyl said. At least this is less troublesome than putting him in touch with Limpopo. “Well, we can find a bridge to default. The connectivity here’s good, though I haven’t tried to do anything latency-sensitive with default yet.”
“Where are we, anyway?”
Kersplebedeb laughed. “You’ll love this.”
“What?”
“We’re at the B&B. The second one. After we left, another group of walkaways rebuilt it, made it slightly, uh—”
“Huge,” Kersplebedeb said. “I visited the old one once, and this one makes it look like a shed. Sleeps four thousand now. It’s not an inn, it’s a town. There’s the biggest, freakiest vertical farm you’ve seen, ten stories tall.”
“How’d it get so big?”
“There’s places around the Niagara Escarpment that are shutting down. Counties are bankrupt, privatized, schools shut, hospitals, too. They cleared out and went wherever they could. Some walkaways in Romania have good rammed-earth designs that make building simpler. New B&B wings spring up. Sometimes a building just appears, some place you were the day before, with its fixtures and fittings. There’s kids playing street-hockey out front and grannies watching from the stoop.”
“That sounds wonderful. I wish I could see it.”
“I’ll send you photos.” Gretyl was grateful for the change of subject.
“I just realized I have a UI. Literally until I thought, ‘How does this place look?’ It didn’t look like anything and then, whoosh, there’s a UI, like a demo, a dash with vector clip-art buttons, chat, settings, cams, files, infographics...”
“That’s a Dis thing,” Gretyl said. “She got tired of waiting for images in her visual sensorium. She found some old UI for shut-ins, people with Gehrig’s, controlled by an E.E.G. Can you see a pointer?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Try and move it.”
“Try how?”
“Just try.”
“Woah.”
“Did it work?”
“It’s working. Hang on—”
Surreptitiously, she opened a mirror of his UI, saw the arrow skip around the big, generic buttons, land on “infographics.”
“How do I click?”
“Just try.”
Now they could both see his infographics. She watched on the screens she’d smoothed around the walls, he watched in his no-space-place where his disembodied, fragile consciousness was revived.
“That’s me, then?”
“That’s reductionist. It’s a way of thinking about specific parts of you. Technically, I’m part of you.”
“How do you figure?”
“You are you because of how you react to me. If you reacted to me in a completely different way to how you’d have reacted back when you were, uh—”
“Made of meat.”
“If you did, you wouldn’t be the same person anymore. This conversation we’re having, it defines you in part.”
“Do I stop being me if you die?”
“Kind of.”
Kersplebedeb made a rude noise.
“No, listen.”
“Hey, I just found the camera for you two.” He’d made a window with feeds from cameras around the room. She looked like shit. So did Kersplebedeb. But she looked old. And fat. And unloved.
She swallowed. “When someone important is gone, you can’t react the way you would if they were there. Like when” – she swallowed – “when Iceweasel was around. I’d get angry, but she’d cool me out. She was part of my cognition, an outboard prosthesis for my emotions. She kept me on even kilter, the way lookahead routines do. When she—” She stopped. “Now she’s gone, I’m not the person I was. Our identities exist in combination with other people.”
Kersplebedeb looked at her funny. “I’ve never thought about it that way, but it’s true. Other people make you better or worse.”
“Gretyl,” Etcetera said, “is Limpopo dead?”
The blood drained from her face.
“Why would you say that?”
“She’s not with you. You’re talking about how people change when people they love are gone. Did Limpopo die?”
“We don’t know,” Gretyl said.
“I don’t think so,” Kersplebedeb said. “It looked like a snatch. Whoever killed you and Jimmy.”
“Who’s Jimmy?”
“He arrived after your scan. The guy who stole the Belt and Braces from you all. Limpopo told me the story.”
The infographics danced.
“That Jimmy? What the actual fuck was he doing around me and Limpopo?”
“You two went back to rescue him. He couldn’t walk. Frostbite. They blew up the Thetford compound, we hit the road. He was in rough shape – showed up in Thetford rough, didn’t have time to recover before we split again. We can’t find a scan for him.”
“But you have Limpopo’s?”
“Yes,” Gretyl said.
“What?”
“What?”
“Estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo, Gretyl. I’m dead, not oblivious. What about Limpopo’s scan?”
“We didn’t want to run it because she might still be alive and that’s a weird thing to do to someone alive. If that person shows up and there’s a sim of her, she has to kill a version of herself. Or confront that possibility.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why is Kersplebedeb looking like you’re full of shit?”
He shrugged. “Forgot he’d found the camera.”
Gretyl stood with her back to the wall, staring at the ceiling.
“What about Limpopo, Kersplebedeb?”
“We’ve been making scans, starting back with a bunch of scientists and, weirdly, two random mercs at Walkaway U; then more at the B&B, and more in Space City. They’re all different, made using different post-processing, different calibration, different gear, different everything. There are walkaways all over the world trying to make scans, everyone’s got their own ideas about it. It’s a mess. This working group came up with a standard way of encapsulating the data and preflighting it to see whether it was likely to run in a given sim. It’s a confidence measure for every brain in a bottle, a single number that represents whether we know how to bring you back to life.”
“Sounds sensible. Things were chaotic when I got scanned. So Limpopo’s scan isn’t as good as you’d hoped?”
“Your scan is a nine point eight. Hers is a one point seven-six.”
“Shit. Scale of ten, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit. Boy am I fucking glad I’m a sim and there’s code keeping me numb. There’s a part of me that knows that this news makes me want to fucking suicide, thinking of eternity as a brain in a jar while Limpopo is dead forever.”
“It’s not quite that. I know what you feel. No one’s heard from Iceweasel in months. Her backup is a two point four. That number doesn’t represent the likelihood we’ll ever be able to run a sim; it represents the likelihood we can run it right now. The problem of modeling human consciousness on computerized substrates is the big one, one that we’ve been prodding at the edges of for years. There’s practically a religion, all that Singularity stuff they used to talk about. We’ve had a breakthrough, it’s led to a couple of spectacular successes, including you, including this conversation. But the most important thing about that breakthrough isn’t what we can do now that we didn’t used to be able to do – it’s the fact that we are making progress. What’s more likely, we’ve just found the only breakthrough out there, or this was just the first of many breakthroughs?”
“I don’t know which. No one does. It’s a data-set with one point. A breakthrough.” But Etcetera sounded excited. His infographics confirmed it.
“It’s more. You know we got Dis’s sim running by simulating her imperfectly? Her busted, unstable sim contributed to the stable version. From here on in, there’s going to be more eminent, legendary scientists who’ve devoted their lives to this running as sims, able to run multiple copies of themselves, to back up different versions of themselves and recover from those backups if they try failed experiments, able to think everything they used to be able to think with their meat-brains and also to think things they never could have thought.
“We’ve designed the mechanical computers that’ll help us build electronic calculators that’ll help us build fully programmable computers. We’ve built the forge that’ll let us make the tools that’ll let us build the forge that’ll let us make better tools that’ll let us build the forge—”
“I get it. I thought sims were prone to infinite recursion. Being a meat-person must totally suck.”
“It does.” She heaved a sigh. “I wish I could paramaterize my brain, keep it from veering off into bad territory. I miss her so much.”
Kersplebedeb put his arms around her. She let him, rested her head on his skinny chest, smelling his boy-smell, tinged with lichen tequila and lentilish vegan fungus-culture. She didn’t let people hug her often, but she should. She missed this.