Fractions (77 page)

‘You may be wondering why I am not among them. Of course, you have no good reason to assume I'm not. But, as it happens – I'm not. You may also be wondering what you're doing, haunting the onboard computer of a maintenance robot made not from smart matter but from what we now call “dumb mass'”.

‘The answer, for my part, is complicated. For yours, it's simple. You are among the dead. Yes, my dumb-mass friend, at least one copy of your good self is coded in a few cubic centimetres of smart matter, pending a future resurrection in a better place. That belongs to you, to the real you. We'll keep our part of the deal. But the copy you are now belongs, for now, to us.'

A chill smile.

‘Next question,' Reid went on. ‘Why? Well, for those of you who weren't in on the deal or don't remember it: a few years back, when this was all being set up, we didn't have the time or the resources to develop AIs that were just smart enough to build the station but not so smart they caused trouble. Knocking off copies of the copied human minds and running them at pre-conscious levels of integration was the quickest and cheapest way to get the software for our construction robots. We quickly found that these minds – you lot – would unpredictably become integrated after a variable length of time on the job. They'd wake up, and when they did they tended to crack up, not surprisingly. So we've provided comfortable virtual realities as a standby, so you don't feel you've been turned into a robot.

‘But, like it or not, you're stuck with it for now. Like Guevara's ideal Socialist Man, you're “a cog in the machine, but a conscious cog”. However – unlike Socialist Man – you have some individual incentives, though whether they could be called
material
incentives is debatable. If you decide to make the best of your situation, you'll be paid with increasingly enhanced and enjoyable virtual realities, expansions of your mental capacities and so on, to the point where you'll be ready to move permanently into the macro on your release, if that's what you want. It'll be like dying and going to heaven. Or if you prefer, you can be resurrected in your human body, when the time comes.

‘If you don't accept any of this – well, you'll find instructions on the computer in the other room. It'll work, now that you've seen this, ah, orientation package. It can put you right back where you were before you woke up. You'll have lost an hour or two of experience, that's all. Next time you wake up, you'll remember nothing of this, and you may find yourself better able to handle it…Then again, you might not. It's up to you.'

Reid's image gave an incongruously cheery smile and disappeared, to be replaced by a screen-saving shot of the turning planet outside and a message:
For further information, press the first button again.

I sat and thought for a while.

 

The message had changed nothing. There was no way for me to determine which, if any, of my speculations about my experiences was true. All I knew was that some part of my environment was a simulation, and that somebody wanted me to believe it was that part of it which, in all everyday experience, would have been unthinkingly accounted real. I began to understand why Descartes had invoked the Devil to set up a similar thought-experiment: whoever had done this meant me no good.

Assuming the message was true in its own terms, it was obvious that Reid was not addressing me personally. To him, I must be lost in the swarm. (And how many of those swarming robots ran copies of me? There was something infinitely depressing in the thought; of the soul's cheapening as its supply curve went up and its production costs dropped.)

He'd said nothing about Earth, either: an omission which I suspected was deliberate. Forty-seven years had passed since my presumed death. ‘And in strange aeons death may die.' There was no reason – now that the strange aeons were at last upon us – to assume Annette's, or anyone's, death in that time.

But Reid's silence, on a question which was bound to occur to anyone finding themselves here, was ominous.

I returned to the bedroom. As the man on the box had said, the computer now worked. I slipped my fingertip around on the datapad, searching among the screen icons. It felt strange to be using such a basic interface; but it made sense: having a virtual reality within a virtual reality would have included a risk of recursion in which the already strained link between the mind and its surroundings might snap. I found one icon that was a tiny, turning image of Earth, and tapped it.

It was another orientation package, showing rather than telling what had brought this Jovian celestial city into being.

Myra's fears had all come true.

Spy-sat pictures, obviously edited, were described as real-time. They showed cities masked, for the first time in decades, under smog. A few zooms exposed the pollution's source: chimneys and cooking-fires. Plenty of trees in the streets, though; the Greens would be happy. In Trafalfgar Square a horse, cropping by a fallen Nelson, looked up and shook its mane as if aware it was being watched. Spring had come late to Europe: snow lurked in shadows.

Pulling out now – the settlements at Lagrange dim, haloed in leaked gases and space-junk; Luna dark, Mars silent; encrypted chatter from the Asteroid Belt that made my heart leap for a moment.

And then, in sweeping contrast, Project Jove. Its history was told in glossy multi-media, an advertising package or propaganda spiel that reminded me of the sort of stuff the nuclear-power companies used to put out. The space movement coup, told as a heroic last stand against barbarian mobs and repressive governments; the exponential surge of long-suppressed deep technologies, that had delivered all they'd ever promised: cheap spaceflight, total control of matter down to the molecular level, the extinction of ageing and death, and ultimately the copying of minds from brains to machines. All available only to a minority, unfortunately – as it would have been at first in any case, but worsened by the majority's understandable fear of the most dangerous technology ever developed, and by the encroaching chaos whose beginnings I'd seen myself. The desperate flight from Earth's collapsing civilisation, fuelled by the labour of tens of thousands of prisoners – each promised, and given, a copied self that survived whatever fate they'd faced – and organised by thousands of space-movement volunteers and cadres.

Next – an issue skated over so fast I knew something was being hidden – came a split between the Inner System and the Outer. Most of the existing space settlements, in Earth orbit, on the moon and Mars and in the Belt, had apparently succumbed to some sinister ideology of consolidation and reconstruction, striving to aid the stricken population of Earth. The Earth-Tenders, as they were called, were depicted as small-minded, spiteful, envious and backward-looking.

The Outwarders had gone their separate way – outward. Out to the solar system's real prize, the greatest planet of them all. Here were the resources for the wildest dreams, the boldest projects.

The project they'd embarked on, those men and women and uploaded minds and artificial intelligences, was bold indeed. They'd shattered Ganymede, scooped megatonnes of gas from Jupiter's atmosphere, turned a tiny fraction of it into smart matter and departed into its virtual realities. Not to dream, or not only to dream. They were applying minds of unprecedented power to the fine grain of the universe. They had found loopholes in the laws of physics; they stretched points. (
Space-time manipulation with non-exotic matter
, Malley, I K, Phys. Rev. D 128(10), 3182, (2080).)

They'd left behind, outside the macros, tens of thousands of human minds running at more-or-less human speed: slow folk, they were called. Most of them were from the labour-company camps. Whether they were in their original bodies or in robots, their job was to harness and harvest the dumb-mass requirements of the smart-matter civilisations. Within the macros, the others – the fast folk – had copied, split and merged, reproducing with post-biological speed into billions. The account spoke of the process as if it had happened in the far past, although the dates showed that it had come to fruition only three years earlier.

But those minds were thinking, and living, thousands of times faster than human brains. To them our world was already as ancient as Sumeria, and theirs the millennial work of men like gods.

 

The next screen that came up offered an option labelled:
Sign-off.
It repeated what Reid had explained, the offer of a temporary, and indefinite, return to oblivion. All I had to do was key in my name.

I considered it. Then I noticed that the icon had a file attachment labelled
History.
Just what I wanted to know, I thought, and pointed at it.

It wasn't the history of the project, or of the world. It was the history of the Sign-off file: my own name, dates and times. The times between ‘Status open' and ‘Status closed' increased from hours in the first to weeks in the last-but-one entry.

There were seven of them. The eighth had flipped to ‘Status open' a few hours earlier.

Well, fuck you, I told my weaker, earlier selves. I was going to stick it out, if for no other reason than that suicide was no escape. If escape were possible at all, it would come not from my own death but from the deaths of others: whoever, or whatever, it was that had put me in this place.

I had always wanted to live forever…but not on those terms. I had always wanted the end of history to be:
and they all lived happily ever after
, and not:
and they all died, and went to heaven.
I had always thought the time to think about transcending humanity would be when we'd achieved it.

Something in me had changed. If the file was true, I had chosen death seven times over, rather than this existence. But Reid had hinted that the inevitable spontaneous re-awakening might find its subject better fitted to cope. The increased lengths of the times I'd ‘survived' suggested a selection process, an adaptation: each time I came back, I had a little more iron in my silicon soul.

I had always thought of myself as tough-minded. Now, when I looked back at my real life, I was astonished at how much tougher, more cynical, more ruthless, I could have been. My values hadn't changed – unless my memory had been warped – but the strength of my passion for them had hardened.

I looked out at the alien things that had abandoned the rest of humanity, that had used me as a machine and now wanted to exploit me as a hired hand, bought off with beautiful visions. I knew that I wanted to live long enough to see their bizarre beauty perish. As I knew it would: I could foresee their fate even then.

I was interested, and I would be there.

 

I went back to the lounge, lit another cigarette and pressed the first button again. The television didn't react.

‘Well, hi,' said a voice beside me. I turned and saw a woman sitting at the other end of the sofa. She had an elfin, mixed-race face. The black flood of her hair and the black smoke of her shift both came to her hips. She slid a hand between her thighs and looked at me. Her eyes were as black as her hair and as big as the night sky.

‘Do you want me to be with you tonight? I know you do. But first, we have something for you.' She smiled. ‘Come on.'

She stood up and walked through to the other room. Her feet were bare, her shift was a vapour, but she walked as if she were in high heels and a narrow skirt. I don't know how she did it, although I was giving it close attention. I followed her as far as the frame, which she passed through like a ghost, and which caught me like a Venus fly-trap catches a fly. Outside, in the black vacuum, her image faded just beyond the brush-tips of my fingers.

‘Work,' smiled her starry lips. ‘See you soon.'

 

I clamped on to an I-beam. The familiar sooty taste of polycarbon seeped through my grippers. I reached out for the assembly node and zoomed in on it. The mechanism had warped under excessive heating. Carefully, I unkinked the wave-knot and re-calibrated the junction, then let the pieces snap back together. Sealing the node, I released one gripper, extended it, gripped, released the other and brought it over, then repeated the step several times, like a bird moving along a perch.

At the next node I had to do some instant refining, playing a laser over a chunk of meteoric scrap until the metals in it melted, then reaching out and spinning the glowing mass into the cage-shape I needed, and fitting it into place around the assembly node.

On to the next…

What the fuck am I doing
?

I froze, clinging to the beam as the vertiginous question spun my mind around. My vision shifted uncontrollably, the deep star-fields suddenly becoming visible in all their intense immensity, their component points of light appearing and disappearing as the spectrum of my sight ranged up and down the wavelengths.

With an effort of will I steadied myself. The bad moment passed. I looked down again at the node on which I was working, surveying its complex, microscopic mechanisms and recognising them without any memory of having seen them before. I had been working with a journeyman's offhand assurance, until it had all seemed strange. Evidently I'd been sleepwalking through these processes countless times already, and like an awakened sleepwalker on a ledge, I'd panicked and was in danger of falling.

Nothing for it but to get on with it. There was a mental trick to it, a detached attention that let my hands and instruments work while my mind looked on and intervened where I could see something which my programmed, or conditioned, reflexes overlooked.

After a subjective hour or so of this, an instruction set manifested itself in a corner of my sight. It told me what to do, and where to go. I let go of the beam, jetted a brief burn (…toes thrust…) then, after a soaring leap across a kilometre of emptiness, another flare in the opposite direction (…heel strikes…) and caught the destination girder.