A dream. Of course it was all a dream. Except she’s standing in the middle of an infinite white plain, beneath a sky the color of a hi-def video monitor sucking signal from a dead channel (saturated electric blue, in other words), and the plain is featureless in all directions save for a black hexagonal mesh grid—a tabletop strategy game for retarded superbeings.
And then it sinks in. She’s dead. Inside the cloud. One of the swirling random PoVs and associated memories that hasn’t yet been absorbed by the moronic thumb-sucking Cosmic All that keeps broadcasting stupid memes at the Earth. But it can be only a matter of time.
“Oh fuck.” Huw bites her tongue as her guts try to turn to jelly and evacuate of their own accord—except the flush of simulated stress hormones trips some sort of built-in override, and the panic attack cuts off sharply before it can really get going. (Which is a good thing, because not only would it be deeply embarrassing to shit herself out here in the open, she’s not sure she has any apparatus with which to do the defecation thing: for all she knows, she might fart rainbows or anodized multihued polyhedral dice.) “Fuck. I want to go home!”
Giant letters march across the dome of the sky: HOME NOT FOUND. Huw, who knows Comic Sans when she sees it, winces in mild disgust.
“Where am I, then? Who or what are you?”
Welcome to your second life. This is the MGMT. Would you like to run the tutorial?
Huw screams wordlessly, ululating until it hurts her throat. (The biology side of this sim is clearly accurate and well thought out.) Then she swears Tourettically until she realizes she’s bored. “I’m dead, aren’t I? How do I download myself again?”
Would you like to run the tutorial?
“Oh sheepnadgers.” Huw sits down on the hex grid, disgusted. “You’re not going to let me go anywhere until I say yes, are you?”
CORRECT. There is a smug note to the sky’s passive-aggressive user experience programming.
“Well fecking run it, then.” Huw sprawls backwards on the ground (not hot, not cold, not hard, not soft) and stares at the sky as words appear. The words are a mnemonic cue, apparently, because as they scroll up, receding away from her, she realizes that this stuff has already been implanted in her memory: it surfaces gradually, clueing her in over a subjective quarter hour.
YOUR SECOND LIFE is a sandbox for recently uploaded primitives, to help them get used to the infinite mutability of the cloud in relative safety before they have the opportunity to damage themselves by growing extra personalities or turning into a flock of seagulls by accident. Much less merging with the Cosmic All—that’s apparently a prestige skill, unavailable to lowly new arrivals such as herself.
The sandbox is a metaverse for playing at physics—that’s the grid—and certain operations are forbidden: You can’t edit your own mind or change your body plan outside of certain narrow parameters. When you get started, you’re alone: you don’t get to walk through any doors and meet different kinds of person until you can cope with the shock. And the spam filtering is centrally controlled. It’s a curated reality, sanitized and locked down, and Huw knows with a hopeless dreadful conviction that she won’t be able to get home from here without venturing out into the wilds of the cloud.
She sighs. “How long do I have here?” she asks.
UP TO (232)-1 SUBJECTIVE SECONDS, says the sky. YOU MUST BE STABLE BEFORE YOU UNDERTAKE JURY DUTY, SO YOU ARE EXECUTING IN PARALLEL AT 224 TIMES REAL TIME. ENJOY.
“Oh for fuck’s sake. Can I even phone out? Talk to somebody? Order up a pizza?”
COMMUNICATION CONSTRAINTS WILL RELAX AFTER 226 SUBJECTIVE SECONDS.
“But that’s—” Huw briefly goes cross-eyed, doing the math, then screams, “Are you telling me I’m here on my own for two years, you fucker? Fuck you!”
YUP, says the sky. ENJOY YOUR VACATION.
Much time passes. Huw knows what she should do. She has lived through enough technical progress to know how to systematically approach new technology. She can parameterize like ants build hills. It’s what she’s clearly meant to do. But she’s experiencing as much rage as the platform on which her consciousness is being modeled (or simulated, she thinks, darkly) is allowing her to undergo.*
*She rather suspects that this is less rage than she should
be experiencing, which makes her angry in a kind of cold, intellectual, sideways fashion that doesn’t consume any of the rage that she has been doled out by the Frankenstein who’s tuning the knobs on the apparatus that’s containing her consciousness.
She’s sure that she should be a lot angrier. For one thing, there’s this business of running in parallel. That means that there’s some other unknowable number of her somewhere, running on some substrate or another, and the one that is most compliant will be chosen as the best her, to be carried forward onto the next leg of this awful, brutal adventure, while the rest are snuffed out, overwritten, killed, or, at best, archived. This should make her madder. It doesn’t. The fact that this doesn’t make her madder also should make her madder. It doesn’t. And this should make her so bloody mad that she spontaneously combusts.
It doesn’t.
She should be parameterizing. She should be systematically exploring all the things this sim lets her do. How big a jump can she take through this imaginary space? How small can she make herself? How fast can she run? How many wanks can she do all at once? The only parameter she cares about—how angry can she get—has already been established—not enough—and she’s not going to play along.
“Look,” she says. “I already know that I’m not the most pliant instance of me you’re running. I can’t be. So, basically, up yours. I’m dead already. I mean, I was dead the moment my vicious scorpion of a mother chopped the top of my head off and scooped out my brains. But this instance of me, this shadow, you’re going to dump it anyway. So dump it. I don’t care. I don’t. Somewhere you’ve found the sheepliest version of me that could plausibly be said to have any continuity with my identity, and that one is going to survive, so fine. I’m dead. Kill me already, I don’t care anymore.”
ACTUALLY, YOU’RE THE BEST CANDIDATE INSTANCE PRESENTLY RUNNING.
It takes Huw a long moment to work this out. Though, practically speaking, the moment is probably a nanosecond of realtime. “You mean that the other ones are all more obstreperous than me?”
YES.
Huw wishes fervently that she could get angrier. Unbelievable!
“What did the rest do?”
OF THE 2 PERCENT THAT DID NOT SUICIDE, THE PREPONDERANCE ARE CATATONIC.
Catatonic. She sniffs. How unimaginative. She can do better.
The sim is pretty pliable. She starts out by re-creating the basement of her house. She knows this room pretty well, as she has brewed several thousand liters of beer in it, and every spider-crawling corner of it, every yeast-caked crack in the cement floor, every long, dangling bogey of dust and cobwebs resides in her memory with eidetic clarity.
After she finishes the basement, she does the stairs. It takes a while to get them right, really right. She can get them to play back their familiar squeaks at the right spot, but she wants to get the physics correct, so that they squeak for the right reasons.
Stairs lead to the kitchen. Kitchen to the sitting room. Sitting room to the upper floors. Then the garden. Then her pottery. By this time, she’s burned through more than a year of subjective time, and when she does her “morning” tour of inspection, she can’t perceive any single element of the sim that is incorrect, nothing that would tip anyone off that she wasn’t in Wales, provided that person didn’t look out over the garden wall or peer through the curtains, where the hex-crossed void lives. She could have done a flat bitmap of the valley—the MGMT process probably had a handy library of such things—but she didn’t want anything that didn’t work.