A cold feeling spread in Limpopo’s gut. She looked at Sita with horror. “You’re not talking about turning people into sims who aren’t moved by natural beauty?”
Sita stared through her face mask. “Oh girl, no. Jesus, you think I’m a monster? We could constrain our sims to spaces where we value nature so much that we prefer to be disembodied and not a force for its destruction, to experiencing it directly.”
“That’s just weird.”
They moved again. Two switchbacks later, Limpopo said, “I think I’ve got that. That is some fucked-up shit.”
“For hundreds of years, people have been trying to get everyone to live gently on the land, but their whole pitch was, ‘hold still and try not to breathe.’ It was all hair-shirt, no glory in nature’s beauty. The environmental prescription has been to act as much as possible like you were already dead. Don’t reproduce. Don’t consume. Don’t trample the earth or you’ll compress the dirt and kill the plants. Every exhalation poisons the atmosphere with CO2. Is it any wonder we haven’t gotten there?
“We know there’s truth in it. It’s all around us. You can only act like the planet is infinite – like wishful thinking trumped physics – for so long before it goes to shit. That’s why Cape Canaveral is a SCUBA site. Think about it too long and you’ll come to the conclusion that nothing you do matters. It’s either kill yourself now or kill your descendants just by drawing breath.
“Now we’ve got a deal for humanity that’s better than anything before: lose the body. Walk away from it. Become an immortal being of pure thought and feeling, able to travel the universe at light speed, unkillable, consciously deciding how you want to live your life and making it stick, by fine-tuning your parameters so you’re the version of yourself that does the right thing, that knows and honors itself.”
They came to a ruined building, a vast refinery or processing plant, big as an aerodrome, two great cave-ins marring the roof line.
Sita gestured at it. “A couple years without maintenance and it just imploded. It’s the climate control. Place like that, unless you build it air- and vapor-tight, give it a Q factor like a space-suit, it’ll cost you more to heat than you could make by running it. That stuff needs climate control or it starts to trap moisture, and come summer it rots. The next winter it’s worse. A couple years later, boom, it’s rubble. That thing was a giant computer that housed people and machines and when they turned the computer off, it was an instant tear-down.
“The universe hates us. We are temporary violations of the second law of thermodynamics. We push entropy off to the edges, but it’s patient, and it builds, and when we take our eyes off of it, kerblam, it’s back with a vengeance.
“You want to change the history of the future, give us a chance for a life worth living, without oppression? There’s only one way. You know it, but you can’t make yourself face it.”
“But I could if I was a sim? Nudge the sliders until I was in the envelope that loved being simulated?”
“Bingo. We’d have a world that belonged to animals, and we’d experience it through sensors that perfectly simulated our wet stuff, but without crushing all those precious roots.”
“Can I make a suggestion?”
“Go ahead.”
“When you make this pitch, don’t mention Lysenko. Making the world a better place by realizing the failed dreams of the pet mad scientist of one of history’s greatest monsters—”
“Duh.”
“Just saying.”
“The point isn’t Lysenko or Stalin. It’s the angels of our better natures. Everything we know we should do but can’t bring ourselves to do because the part of us that sees the whole map and knows it’s the way to go can’t convince the part that’s in the driver’s seat. It’s about being able to choose, make the choice stick.”
“What if someone else chooses for you?”
“If someone else gets control over your sliders? Disaster. Teetotal capsizement. Terror without historical parallel. Better make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“I get the feeling that you’ve already planned this argument, Sita. An ambush.”
“Not an ambush,” she said. “Just the marketplace of ideas. We’re getting somewhere, something is brewing that’s going to bubble over. We’re part of it. I want to get everyone ready for it, so there’s a minimum of headless chickening.”
Limpopo remembered arguments with Jimmy about the way the world was about to change and how she had to face it, how he’d offered to put her in charge if she backed him. It was so nakedly manipulative that she’d never been tempted. Is that what Sita was doing? If so, why wasn’t her back up?
“One more question.”
“As many as you’d like, Limpopo.”
“Just one. Then I want to go back to enjoying nature.”
“Shoot.”
“Why do we have differing levels of executive control over our minds? Why would we evolve to foil our own better natures?”
“Because evolution isn’t directed. It’s not streamlined. We’re an attic stuffed with everything our ancestors found useful, even if it stopped being useful thousands of years ago. Unless it makes you have fewer babies, it hangs around in the genome. Being out of control of your rational priorities certainly increases the number of babies you’ll make.”
Limpopo laughed in spite of herself, despite Sita having obviously used that line before. “All that stuff in the attic, it’s useful, right? That’s why the attics themselves haven’t been squeezed out by evolution. Having a statistically normal distribution across every trait – including the ability to make up your mind and stick to it – means that as a species we’re able to face a variety of challenges. We’ve got a tool for every occasion, genomically speaking.”
“Can I interrupt you?”
“Of course.”
“This isn’t a new argument. There’s a whole neurodiversity contingent who hate my ideas of sliders, and want to preserve our incapacity to ‘make up your mind and stick to it’ in case there’s some hypothetical species-destroying crossroads in the future where we need to rescue it. I say, you keep your irrationality intact. I’ll switch mine off. Other people can make up their own minds. Because the inability to see reason is a species-destroying crossroads and we’re at it now. If we don’t figure out how to put off gratification today for survival tomorrow, to beat the solipsist’s delusion that you’re a special snowflake—”
“Okay, I know how this goes.”
“I know you do.”
They picked through the ruins, over huge machines under their blankets of snow and treacherous piles of rubble that could be used as wobbly staircases to reach the remains of the roof and odd preserved relics, including a manager’s station with a faded set of laminated safety memos tacked around its missing observation window.
“If it turns out the level of executive control we get from sims backfires, we’ll just turn it off. That’s the point of executive controclass="underline" deciding what you’re going to do.”
“What about the existential crises?”
“What?”
“Iceweasel told me that Dis kept suiciding—”
“Crashing.”
“Terminally freaking. Until you figured out how to constrain her to versions of herself that wouldn’t have existential crises.”
“Yeah...” She sounded cautious. Limpopo sensed weakness.
“You can’t simulate someone unless you turn down the slider that freaks out at the thought of being simulated.”
“Yes...” Deeper caution.