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. Running 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’ve 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 other’s eyes and smiled and looked again – she felt like weights were hanging on her limbs and eyelids.
The last thing she thought of was Gretyl’s race of permanent overlords, and how much her dad would love that idea.
After a week, everyone stopped walking stooped over, ready for the ceiling to cave in when the drones finished their work. The default commentariat figured out walkaway labs were being terminated with prejudice, and photos of fried corpses that made the rounds on the walkaway net leaked into default. The consensus was that a second strike against the underground campus – whose secrecy was never great and had slipped within days of the attack – was unlikely. Still, they devised evacuation drills.
It wasn’t medical supplies that filled the tunnels – it was computers. Abstractly, Iceweasel knew computers had mass. All the ones she’d consciously interacted with had been so small as to be invisible – a speck of electronics stuck to something big enough to handle with stupid human hands. Somewhere, were air-conditioned, armored data centers full of computers, but they only appeared as plot-elements in shitty gwot dramas. She assumed that these geometrically precise wind-tunnel buildings with bombproof bollards and monster chillers had the relationship to reality that Hollywood bank vaults had to real vaults.
Whether “real” data centers were neat, ranked terraces of aerodynamic hardware, that’s not how walkaways did them. The word went out across the region for compute-power. People came with whatever horsepower they had. They logged it with the master load-balancer, which all the top comp-sci types fiddled with. “Load-balancer” became a conjurer’s phrase, curse and invocation. Something was always wrong, but it did miracles, because the collection of motley devices, sprinkled around the tunnels, linked by tangles of fiber in pink rubber sheaths, delivered compute cycles that made Dis leap into consciousness.
Iceweasel’s workspace was near a tunnel exit where the heat wasn’t bad and she could watch the warring researcher clades. The comp-sci people always wanted to reboot Dis every time they found a new way of eking out another point of efficiency on the load-balancer; the cog-sci people hated this because Dis was making breakthroughs in upload and simulation. Being liberated from the vagaries of the flesh and being able to adjust her mind’s parameters so she stayed in an optimal working state turned Dis into a powerhouse researcher.
It also made her miserable.
“I’m groundhog daying again, aren’t I?”