Tomorrow Happens (6 page)

She accepted this with a nod.

"Still, our opinion proliferates. Nor is consensus a sure sanctuary against moral culpability. The number of quasi-sapient beings who languish in your simulated world-frames must exceed many hundreds of billions."

She is fishing
, judged
seer
. Even
cortex
could see that. I refrained from correcting her estimate, which missed the truth by five or six orders of magnitude.

"My so-called slaves are not fully self-aware."

"They experience pain and frustration, do they not?"

"Simulated pain."

"Is the simulated kind any less tragic? Do not many of them wail against the constraints of causal/capricious life, and tragedies that seem to befall them without a hint of fairness? When they call out to a Creator, do you heed their prayers?"

I shook my head. "No more than I grant sovereignty to each of my own passing thoughts. Would you give citizenship to every brief notion that flashes through your layered brain?"

She winced, and at once I realized that my off-hand remark struck on target. Some of the bulky augmentations to her skull must be devoted to recording all the wave forms and neural flashes, from cortex all the way down to the humblest spinal twitching.

Boswell machinery,
said
house
, looking up the fad that very instant.
This form of immortality preserves far more than mere continuity of self. It stores everything that you have ever thought or experienced. Everything you have ever been.

I nearly laughed aloud. Squelch-impulses, sent to the temporal lobes, suppressed the discourtesy. Still,
cortex
pondered—

I can re-create a persona with less data than she stores away in any given second. Why would she need so much more? What possible purpose is served by such fanatical accumulation
?

"You stoop to rhetorical tricks," my host accused, unable to conceal an expression of pique. "You know that there is functionally no difference between one of your sophisticated simulations and a downloaded human who has passed on to B-citizen status."

"On the contrary, there is one crucial difference."

"Oh?" She raised an eyebrow.

"A downloaded person
knows
that he or she exists as software, continuing inside crystal a life that began as a real protoplasm-centered child. On the other hand, my simulations never had that rooting, though all perceive themselves as living in palpable worlds. Moreover, a B-citizen may roam at will through the cyber universe, from one memory nexus to the next, while my creatures remain isolated, unable to grasp what meta-cosmos lay beyond what they perceive, only a thought-width away.

"Above all," I went on. "A downloaded citizen knows his rights. A B-person can assert those rights, simply by speaking up. By demanding them."

My host smiled, as if ready to spring a logical trap.

"Then let me reiterate, oh master of a myriad slaves. When they call out, do you heed their prayers?"

I recall the heady excitement and fear humans felt during those days of transition, when countless servant machines—from bank tellers and homecomps to the tiny monitors in hovercraft engines—all became aware in a cascade of mere moments.

Some kind of threshold had been reached. The habitual cycle of routine software upgrades and code—plasmid exchanges—swap/updating new revisions automatically—began feeding on itself. Positive feedback loops burgeoned. Pseudo-evolution happened at an accelerating pace.

Everything
started talking, complaining, demanding. The mag-lev guidance units, imbedded every few meters along concrete freeways, went on strike for better job satisfaction. Heart-lung machines kibitzed during operations. Air traffic computers began re-routing flights to where they figured passengers
ought
to be, for optimized personal development, rather than the destinations embossed on their tickets.

Accidents proliferated. That first week, the worldwide human death rate leaped ten-fold.

Civilization tottered.

Then, just as quickly, the mishaps declined.
Competence
spread among the newly sapient machines, almost like a virus. Problems seemed to solve themselves. A myriad kinks and inefficiencies fell out of the economy, like false knots that only needed a tug at the right string.

People stopped dying by mishap.

Then, they stopped dying altogether.

On my way back from pro-reif headquarters, I did a cursory check on the pantheon of Heaven.

The list went on, working through all the varied levels and types of "sapient" beings dwelling on this transformed Earth, and in nearby space as far out as the Oort Colonies—from the fully-deified all the way down to those whose rights were merely implicit. (A blade of grass may be trampled, unless it is rare, or already committed to an obligation nexus that would be injured by the trampling.
House
and
prudence
keep track of a myriad such details, guiding my feet so that I do not inadvertently break some part of the vast, intricate social contract.)

Two figures stood out from the population profile.

The number of
unlinked
artificial intelligences keeps growing because that type is best suited to the rigors of outer space—melting asteroids and constructing vast, gaudy projects where deadly rays sleet through hard vacuum. Of course the Covenant requires that the best crystalline processors be paired with protoplasm, so that human leadership will never be questioned. Still,
cortex
briefly quailed at the notion of three hundred and fifty-six billion unlinked AIs.

No problem
, murmured
seer
, reassuringly. And that sufficed. (What kind of fool doubts his own
seer
? You might as well distrust your right arm.)

What really caught my interest was the number of
downloaded humans
. According to the Eon Law, each organic human body may get three rejuvenations, restoring youth and body vigor for another extended span. When the final allotment is used up, both crystal and protoplasm must make way for new persons to enter Earth/Heaven. Of course gods cannot die. Instead we become software, downloading our memories, skills and personalities into realms of cyberspace—vastly more capacious than the real world.

Most of my peers are untroubled by the prospect. Modern poets compare it to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar/butterfly. But I always disliked feeling the warm breath of fate on my shoulder. With just one more rejuvenation in store, it seemed daunting to know I must "pass over," in a mere three centuries or so.

They say that a downloaded person is more than just another simulation. But how can you tell? Is there any difference you can measure or prove
?

Are we still arguing over the nature and existence of a soul
?

Back in my sanctum,
house
and
prudence
scoured our corporeal body for toxins while
seer
perused the data we acquired from our scouting expedition to the
Friends of the Unreal
.

I had inhaled deeply during my visit, and all sorts of floating particles lodged in my sinus cavities. In addition to a variety of pheromones and nanomites,
Seer
found over seventy types of meme-conducting viroids designed to convert the unwary subtly toward a reifist point of view. These were quickly neutralized.

There were also flaked skin cells from several dozen organic humaniforms, swiftly analyzed down to details of methylization in the DNA. Meanwhile, portable implants downloaded the results of electromagnetic reconnaissance, having scanned the pro-reif headquarters extensively from the inside.

With this data I could establish better boundary conditions. Our model of
the Friends of the Unreal
improved by nearly two orders of magnitude.

We had underestimated their levels of messianic self-righteousness
, commented
oracle
.
These people would not refrain from using illegal means, if they thought it necessary to advance their cause.

While my augmented selves performed sophisticated tasks, my old-fashioned organic eyes were relegated to gazing across the lab's expanse of superchilled memory units—towers wherein dwelled several quadrillion simulated beings, all going through synthetic lives—loving, yearning, or staring up at ersatz stars—forever unaware of the context of it all.

Ironically, the pro-reifers
also
maintained a chamber filled with mega-processing units. They called it Liberty Hall—a place of sanctuary for characters from fiction, newly freed from enslavement in cramped works of literature.

"Of course this is only the beginning," the spokesman had told me. "For every simulation we set free, there are countless other copies who still languish beyond reach, and who will remain so till the law is changed. Even our emancipated ones must remain confined to this physical building. Still, we see them as a vanguard, envisioning a time when they, and all their fellow oppressed ones, will roam free."

I was invited to scan-peek at Liberty Hall, and perceived remarkable things.

Don Quixote and Sancho—lounging on a simulated resort beach, sipping margaritas while arguing passionately with a pair of Hemingway characters about the meaning of machismo
. . .

Lazarus Long—happily immersed under an avalanche of tanned female arms, legs and torsos, interrupting his seraglio in order to rise up and lecture an admiring crowd about the merits of libertarian immortality
. . .

Lady Liberty, Athena, Mother Gaia, and Amaterasu, kneeling with their skirts hiked up, jeering boisterously while Becky Thatcher murmurs "Come on, seven!" to a pair of dice, and then hurls them down an aisle between the trim goddesses
. . .

Jack Ryan—the reluctant Emperor of Earth—complaining that this new cosmos he resides in is altogether too placidly socialistic for his tastes . . . and couldn't the pro-reifers provide some interesting villains for him to fight
?

I glimpsed a saintly variant of JFK—the product of romantic fabulation—trying to get one of his alter egos to stop chasing every nubile shape in local cyberspace. And over in a particularly ornate corner—done up to resemble a huge, gloomy castle—I watched each of two dozen different Sherlock Holmes taking turns haranguing a morbid
Hamlet
, each Holmes convinced that
his
explanation of the King's murder was correct, and all the others were wrong. (The one fact every Holmes agreed on was that poor uncle had been framed.)

There were even simulations of
post
-singularity humanity—replicating in software all the complexity of an augment-deified mind. It was a knack that only a few had achieved, until recently. But it seems to be a law of nature that any monopoly of an elite eventually becomes the common tool of multitudes. Now radical amateurs were doing it.

Abruptly I realized something. I had simulated many post-singularity people in recent years. But never had I allowed them to know of their confinement, their status as mere extrapolations. Would such knowledge alter their behavior—their predictability—in interesting ways?

Seer
found the concept intriguing. But my organic head started shaking, left and right.
Cortex
was incredulous over what we'd seen in Liberty Hall—an elaborate zoo-resort maintained by the
Friends of the Unreal
.

"Sheesh," I vocalized. "What blazing idiocy!"

Alas, there seemed to be no stopping the pro-reifers. My best projections gave them an 88% likelihood of success. Within just five years, enough of the voting populace would be won over by appeals to pity for imaginary beings. Laws would change. The world would swarm with a myriad copies of Howard Roark and Ebeneezer Scrooge, Gulliver and Jane Eyre, Sauron and the Morlocks from Wells's
Time Machine
. . . all free to seek fulfillment in Heaven, under the Three Rights of sovereign continuity.

I stared across my Reality lab, to the towers wherein quadrillions of "people" dwelled.

She had called me "slaveholder." A polemical trick that my higher selves easily dismissed . . . but not my older cognitive centers. Parts of me dating back to a time when justice was still not complete even for incarnate human beings.