‘The date is –’ (a slight hiatus, a glitch of editing software) ‘– March 3rd, 2093. This may come as a surprise, if you’ve figured out what’s going on – surely, you think, not so soon? Welcome to the Singularity. What you’re seeing outside is the work of billions of conscious beings, living and thinking thousands of times faster than you. The entities crawling among the struts of this structure are entire civilisations of humanity’s descendants. Those macro-organisms, or macros, as the humans around here call them, are constellations of smart matter – what we used to call nanotech – each of them capable of sustaining virtual realities that are the homes of millions of minds – some originally human, some artificial intelligences. Every one of those minds experiences simulations, shared or private, of worlds beyond our wildest dreams. Each is capable of augmenting its capacities far beyond anything we think of as human, and has the opportunity to do so in exact proportion to its ability to make good use of its existing capacities.
‘And many of them were once like you! An ordinary human being, whose brain had been recorded, neurone by neurone, synapse by synapse in an infiltrating matrix of smart matter. Recorded, and replicated, and run on superior hardware with a success which you are right now in the ideal position to appreciate.’
He laughed. Something in his tone chilled me, a cynicism as deep and mature as that sentiment is usually shallow and callow.
‘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.