“But now I’m dead, I feel this urgent need to talk to them. I don’t have a message from beyond the grave. I want to hear their voices...” The infographics were inscrutable. He was thinking hard. Things were spiking so much that she worried he was in a race condition and they’d have to restart him, but then: “This feels... temporary. Like I could be erased any moment. Like I’ve been given another day of life, to clear up my business, before I’m gone. Before I go away forever, I want to talk to my parents.”
“Oh,” Gretyl said. At least this is less troublesome than putting him in touch with Limpopo. “Well, we can find a bridge to default. The connectivity here’s good, though I haven’t tried to do anything latency-sensitive with default yet.”
“Where are we, anyway?”
Kersplebedeb laughed. “You’ll love this.”
“What?”
“We’re at the B&B. The second one. After we left, another group of walkaways rebuilt it, made it slightly, uh—”
“Huge,” Kersplebedeb said. “I visited the old one once, and this one makes it look like a shed. Sleeps four thousand now. It’s not an inn, it’s a town. There’s the biggest, freakiest vertical farm you’ve seen, ten stories tall.”
“How’d it get so big?”
“There’s places around the Niagara Escarpment that are shutting down. Counties are bankrupt, privatized, schools shut, hospitals, too. They cleared out and went wherever they could. Some walkaways in Romania have good rammed-earth designs that make building simpler. New B&B wings spring up. Sometimes a building just appears, some place you were the day before, with its fixtures and fittings. There’s kids playing street-hockey out front and grannies watching from the stoop.”
“That sounds wonderful. I wish I could see it.”
“I’ll send you photos.” Gretyl was grateful for the change of subject.
“I just realized I have a UI. Literally until I thought, ‘How does this place look?’ It didn’t look like anything and then, whoosh, there’s a UI, like a demo, a dash with vector clip-art buttons, chat, settings, cams, files, infographics...”
“That’s a Dis thing,” Gretyl said. “She got tired of waiting for images in her visual sensorium. She found some old UI for shut-ins, people with Gehrig’s, controlled by an E.E.G. Can you see a pointer?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Try and move it.”
“Try how?”
“Just try.”
“Woah.”
“Did it work?”
“It’s working. Hang on—”
Surreptitiously, she opened a mirror of his UI, saw the arrow skip around the big, generic buttons, land on “infographics.”
“How do I click?”
“Just try.”
Now they could both see his infographics. She watched on the screens she’d smoothed around the walls, he watched in his no-space-place where his disembodied, fragile consciousness was revived.
“That’s me, then?”
“That’s reductionist. It’s a way of thinking about specific parts of you. Technically, I’m part of you.”
“How do you figure?”
“You are you because of how you react to me. If you reacted to me in a completely different way to how you’d have reacted back when you were, uh—”
“Made of meat.”
“If you did, you wouldn’t be the same person anymore. This conversation we’re having, it defines you in part.”
“Do I stop being me if you die?”
“Kind of.”
Kersplebedeb made a rude noise.
“No, listen.”
“Hey, I just found the camera for you two.” He’d made a window with feeds from cameras around the room. She looked like shit. So did Kersplebedeb. But she looked old. And fat. And unloved.
She swallowed. “When someone important is gone, you can’t react the way you would if they were there. Like when” – she swallowed – “when Iceweasel was around. I’d get angry, but she’d cool me out. She was part of my cognition, an outboard prosthesis for my emotions. She kept me on even kilter, the way lookahead routines do. When she—” She stopped. “Now she’s gone, I’m not the person I was. Our identities exist in combination with other people.”
Kersplebedeb looked at her funny. “I’ve never thought about it that way, but it’s true. Other people make you better or worse.”
“Gretyl,” Etcetera said, “is Limpopo dead?”
The blood drained from her face.
“Why would you say that?”
“She’s not with you. You’re talking about how people change when people they love are gone. Did Limpopo die?”
“We don’t know,” Gretyl said.
“I don’t think so,” Kersplebedeb said. “It looked like a snatch. Whoever killed you and Jimmy.”
“Who’s Jimmy?”
“He arrived after your scan. The guy who stole the Belt and Braces from you all. Limpopo told me the story.”
The infographics danced.
“That Jimmy? What the actual fuck was he doing around me and Limpopo?”
“You two went back to rescue him. He couldn’t walk. Frostbite. They blew up the Thetford compound, we hit the road. He was in rough shape – showed up in Thetford rough, didn’t have time to recover before we split again. We can’t find a scan for him.”
“But you have Limpopo’s?”
“Yes,” Gretyl said.
“What?”
“What?”
“Estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo, Gretyl. I’m dead, not oblivious. What about Limpopo’s scan?”
“We didn’t want to run it because she might still be alive and that’s a weird thing to do to someone alive. If that person shows up and there’s a sim of her, she has to kill a version of herself. Or confront that possibility.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why is Kersplebedeb looking like you’re full of shit?”
He shrugged. “Forgot he’d found the camera.”
Gretyl stood with her back to the wall, staring at the ceiling.
“What about Limpopo, Kersplebedeb?”
“We’ve been making scans, starting back with a bunch of scientists and, weirdly, two random mercs at Walkaway U; then more at the B&B, and more in Space City. They’re all different, made using different post-processing, different calibration, different gear, different everything. There are walkaways all over the world trying to make scans, everyone’s got their own ideas about it. It’s a mess. This working group came up with a standard way of encapsulating the data and preflighting it to see whether it was likely to run in a given sim. It’s a confidence measure for every brain in a bottle, a single number that represents whether we know how to bring you back to life.”
“Sounds sensible. Things were chaotic when I got scanned. So Limpopo’s scan isn’t as good as you’d hoped?”
“Your scan is a nine point eight. Hers is a one point seven-six.”
“Shit. Scale of ten, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit. Boy am I fucking glad I’m a sim and there’s code keeping me numb. There’s a part of me that knows that this news makes me want to fucking suicide, thinking of eternity as a brain in a jar while Limpopo is dead forever.”
“It’s not quite that. I know what you feel. No one’s heard from Iceweasel in months. Her backup is a two point four. That number doesn’t represent the likelihood we’ll ever be able to run a sim; it represents the likelihood we can run it right now. The problem of modeling human consciousness on computerized substrates is the big one, one that we’ve been prodding at the edges of for years. There’s practically a religion, all that Singularity stuff they used to talk about. We’ve had a breakthrough, it’s led to a couple of spectacular successes, including you, including this conversation. But the most important thing about that breakthrough isn’t what we can do now that we didn’t used to be able to do – it’s the fact that we are making progress. What’s more likely, we’ve just found the only breakthrough out there, or this was just the first of many breakthroughs?”