Walkaway Read online

  The progress bar stalled at 87 percent for so long that someone got a spool of fiber, while the wood-elf disappeared to a server room and did stuff that made the now-directly-linked interface jump around a lot.

  “Sorry about this,” Sita said. “All the demos we’ve done so far were under better circumstances. No one thought there would be a live-fire exercise under these circumstances. CC’s been freaking out since the bombs dropped and he realized that he wasn’t playing for table stakes.”

  CC jogged her memory—the wood-elf was called Citizen Cyborg, such a prototypical walkaway name that she couldn’t retain it. Then CC was back, he elbowed the others from the interface surface and did stuff. There was a click-pop and a chime that made him nod. The other people recognized it, and the noise-floor dropped down to near zero.

  “They’ve got you in a terrible lab, CC,” said a synthesized voice. It was a good voice, but the cadence was wrong. The words appeared on-screen—each word hairy with a cloud of hanging data.

  “It’s got her sense of humor,” Sita said. “That’s good.”

  Gretyl, beside her, told Iceweasel what she’d already figured out. “That’s Disjointed. She was a bombing casualty. Her recording’s only a couple of days old. She thought this might be coming. CC’s got her running across the whole cluster.”

  “That’s a brain in a jar?” Iceweasel said.

  “Mind in a jar,” Sita said.

  “The brain’s ashes.” Gretyl shivered.

  “So why isn’t it saying ‘Where am I? What has happened to my body?’” These were staples of upload melodramas, a formal genre requirement.

  Gretyl said, “Because we don’t boot the sim into the state that it was scanned in. We bring it up to an intermediate state, a trance, and tell it what’s happened. Everyone who goes into the scanner knows that this will happen—we’ve been experimenting with ways of booting sims for years, to find minimally traumatic ways of bringing them to awareness. Or ‘awareness.’” She made finger quotes.

  CC rocked his head, wiggled his jaw. “Disjointed, this isn’t a drill. You’re meat-dead. The scenario you got at load-time? Real. We’re in the bunker.”

  A pregnant cursor-blink. Iceweasel hadn’t seen a blinking cursor outside of a historical, but it made sense to give the brain-in-a-jar a way to indicate pauses. The infographics were crazy.

  Gretyl whispered, “They’re spawning low-rez sims of Disjointed, trying to find endocrinological parameters to keep the sim from freaking out and melting down, but keeping the neural processes within the normal envelope of what we know about Dis from her captured life-data.”

  Sita leaned into her other ear. “It’s like they’re trying to find a sedative dose that keeps her calm without making her into a zombie.”

  “Shit. You’re doing something really crazy with my hormone levels, I feel it. Give me a minute of autonomic control, to see if I can survive? If not, roll back to this point and start over.”

  “Uh,” CC said. “Disjointed—”

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve booted me since you bugged out? I hate Groundhog Day scenarios.”

  “She was always the smartest,” Gretyl said. “That’s why we’ve got to get her online—she’s the only one who’ll be able to bring the whole cohort up. See how fast she figured that?”

  “Thank you, Gretyl,” the voice said. “Who’s with you?”

  “I’m Iceweasel. Came from the Banana and Bongo with relief supplies.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Another long pause. The infographics danced. It felt invasive to watch them. Iceweasel didn’t know where else to look. “Sorry, I’m not myself.”

  “Disjointed,” CC said, “you’re freaking. We can tell. Look, I’m going to bring you back up again, okay? Do you have any parameter suggestions for our next try?”

  “How much power have you got left? Could you do a longer lookahead next? We’ve run this scenario before and we were able to keep the model stable.”

  “You were alive then,” CC said. The infographics blossomed into frantic motion.

  “Wrong thing to say,” Iceweasel said, quietly. Gretyl and Sita nodded.

  “Dis! Dis!” Sita said. “It’s Sita.”

  “I know it’s Sita.” It lacked the expressive range to be snappish, but the word-choice and cadence left no doubt. “What is it?”

  “We’re going to be running at minimal power for a month while we tank up—longer, depending on wind and sun. Assuming they don’t bomb us. There’s not enough juice to do the lookahead you want, not unless we clock you down to half speed.”

  “That won’t work. At half speed, I won’t be able to carry on social interaction with you. Express ticket to a head-crash.”

  Iceweasel whispered to Sita: “What about those analytics? Why don’t you just come up with some kind of homeostatic code that tries to keep all parameters within range?”

  “Because I’m nonlinear, that’s why,” the voice said. Iceweasel supposed that in addition to the phased-array optics on the surface, the Disjointed bot could access an array of mics, meaning she could tune into any conversation in the room. Iceweasel had thrown parties in Toronto where her big wall was fed off of some other rich kid’s party, and had been able to pick out every conversation individually just by pointing. The bot she was talking to through the screen could do the same.

  “I’m not deterministic. Otherwise they wouldn’t have to do lookahead to keep me from losing my shit. I’m sensitive to initial parameters and prone to singularities. So are you. That’s what defines us. Or you. I don’t know what defines me anymore. Oh.” There was another blink-cursored pause. None of this had been in any of the upload dramas Iceweasel watched. She’d gone through a phase, dumb shows about people who put their brains into computers and became multifarious—Multifarious was the name of the most successful one, and it had sold to some zotta for like nine billion dollars, with merchandising rights—but she’d gotten sick of them.

  It was because she’d co-binged on ancient movies about space travel and realized all those dramatic situations about getting into space were wish-fulfillment and/or parochial fearmongering, and the same had to be true of upload-fi. Whatever that stuff ended up looking like and whatever problems it would have, they would be weirder and less showy than the videos.

  “I get that.” Whatever was in the university yogurt, it wasn’t working. Iceweasel had major social anxiety. Everyone was looking and judging. They probably were, of course. Why had she opened her stupid mouth?

  Hanging around Limpopo had taught her you never looked stupid for asking basic questions in good faith. “The thing I really don’t get is why you’re okay with being rebooted—isn’t that dying?”

  Everyone was still looking. “Of course. It’s exactly like dying, but I know I’ll be back. There’s selective pressure at boot-time. Think of it—when we’re booting a sim like me, it starts off primitive, and we can lookahead at low compute-cost to figure out parameters for each successive step to full consciousness.” Pause, cursor-blink. “Or whatever I have. One of the key questions each of those lookahead versions of me is being asked is, ‘Will you have an existential crisis when you realize that you’re a simulation?’ The possible ‘me’s’ with highest tolerance for being a head-in-a-jar have the best fitness factors for fully spawning. I’m emergent and complex, but within the envelope of all possible responses I might have to this situation is not melting down, so that’s the corner of the envelope we explore when we boot me up.

  “You’re thinking, ‘Fine, but how can you call that a simulation, if you can only simulate the rare circumstances in which the thing being simulated doesn’t have a conniption and crash?’ But fuck that. Now we can do this, it’s going to be a matter of time until the dead outnumber the living, and all the dead will be the versions of themselves that don’t have existential fits. It’s a cognitive bottleneck we’re going to squeeze the human race through—”

  “I wasn’t thinking that at all,” Iceweasel s
aid. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re a person and whatever you’re thinking is your own damned business.”

  “If you weren’t thinking that, you probably aren’t very bright. No offense.”

  CC broke in: “Don’t be an asshole, Dis.”

  “I’m not being an asshole. I just don’t understand how a meat-person can contemplate what I’ve become without a smidge of existential angst. It’s not natural.”

  Iceweasel couldn’t help laughing. It was the nervous exhaustion, not to mention the wonderment, and it bent her double.

  To her amazement, the bot laughed, too. The weirdest thing about the synthetic laugh was how natural it sounded. More natural than speech.

  “Okay, screw natural. Stranger, I am a freak and so are you and we’re both kinked by our computing platform. What’s your point?”

  “I know I’m not an expert, but if you’re prepared to live within your, uh, ‘constrained envelope’ to keep from suiciding as soon as you boot, what’s wrong with constraining your envelope a little more? Just knock the edges off your virtual endocrinology and streamline yourself so that you can have the stability to come up with a less-constrained way of running. Your brain got incinerated, this sim is all that’s left. Back it up, freeze it as it is now, then take an axe to a copy, brute-force it into a mode where it stays metastable even if that means straying outside of what is considered to be ‘you.’ You’ve just explained that the only ‘you’ that can wake in the sim is one that’s okay with being rebooted periodically. How’s that different from booting a version that’s okay with being whittled down to a robotically cool version of itself?”

  Everyone looked from the blinking cursor to her and back. The infographics danced. There was one she’d sussed, a go/no-go tachometer that represented the model’s overall stability. It was greenish. Greener. The cursor blinked. CC was doing something in a corner where there was more complex stuff, numbers and tables.

  “You are not a total fucking idiot.”

  “That’s high praise, coming from Dis,” Sita said. They joined in with the computer’s laugh.

  [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. Runn
ing 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 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 others’ eyes and smiled and looked again—she felt like weights were hanging on her limbs and eyelids.