Authors: Greg Egan
She lay there awhile in a stupor, burying her face in the pillow, waiting for the ghost images of Petri dishes and enzymes to fade. Five years ago, she could have worked all night, and suffered nothing worse than a fit of yawning in the middle of the afternoon. Now, she felt like she'd been hit by a train -- and she knew she'd be a wreck for days.
Thirty-one is old, old, old.
Her head throbbed, her whole body ached. She didn't care. All the time and money she'd squandered on the Autoverse was worth it, now. Every moment she'd spent there had been vindicated.
Yeah?
She rolled onto her back and opened her eyes.
What, exactly, had changed?
It was still nothing but a self-indulgent hobby, an elaborate computer game. She'd be famous with seventy-two other anal-retentive Autoverse freaks.
How many
bills would that pay? How many typhoons would it neutralize?
She wrapped her head in the pillow, feeling crippled, stupid, hopeless -- and defiantly happy -- until her limbs went numb, her mouth went dry, and the room seemed to rock her to sleep.
5
(Remit not paucity)
NOVEMBER 2050
Peer anchored the soles of both feet and the palm of one hand firmly against the glass, and rested for a while. He tipped his head back to take in, one more time, the silver wall of the skyscraper stretching to infinity above him. Cotton-wool clouds drifted by, higher than any part of the building -- even though the building went on forever.
He freed his right foot, reanchored it higher up the wall, then turned and looked down at the neat grid of the city below, surrounded by suburbs as orderly as ploughed fields. The foreshortened countryside beyond formed a green-brown rim to the hemispherical bowl of the Earth; a blue-hazed horizon bisected the view precisely. The features of the landscape, like the clouds, were "infinitely large," and "infinitely distant"; a finite city, however grand, would have shrunk to invisibility, like the base of the skyscraper. The distance was more than a trick of perspective, though; Peer knew he could keep on approaching the ground for as long as he liked, without ever reaching it. Hours, days, centuries.
He couldn't remember beginning the descent, although he understood clearly -- cloud-knowledge, cloud-memories -- the sense in which there was a beginning, and the sense in which there was none. His memories of the skyscraper, like his view of it, seemed to converge toward a vanishing point; looking back from the present moment, all he could recall was the act of descending, punctuated by rest. And although his mind had wandered, he'd never lost consciousness; his past seemed to stretch back seamlessly, forever -- yet he could hold it all in his finite gaze, thanks to some law of mental perspective, some calculus of memory limiting the sum of ever diminishing contributions to his state of mind from ever more distant moments in the past. But he had his cloud-memories, too; memories from before the descent. He couldn't join them to the present, but they existed nonetheless, a backdrop informing everything else. He knew exactly who he'd been, and what he'd done, in that time before the time he now inhabited.
Peer had been exhausted when he'd stopped, but after a minute's rest he felt, literally, as energetic and enthusiastic as ever. Back in cloud-time, preparing himself, he'd edited out any need or desire for food, drink, sleep, sex, companionship, or even a change of scenery, and he'd preprogrammed his exoself -- the sophisticated, but nonconscious, supervisory software which could reach into the model of his brain and body and fine-tune any part of it as required -- to ensure that these conditions remained true. He resumed the descent gladly, a happy Sisyphus. Making his way down the smooth mirrored face of the skyscraper was, still, the purest joy he could imagine: the warmth of the sun reflecting back on him, the sharp cool gusts of wind, the faint creak of steel and concrete. Adrenaline and tranquility. The cycle of exertion and perfect recovery. Perpetual motion. Touching infinity.
The building, the Earth, the sky, and his body vanished. Stripped down to vision and hearing, Peer found himself observing his Bunker: a cluster of display screens floating in a black void. Kate was on one screen; two-dimensional, black-and-white, nothing but her lips moving.
She said, "You set your threshold pretty damn high. You'd be hearing about this a decade later if I hadn't called you in."
Peer grunted -- disconcerted for a moment by the lack of tactile feedback from the conventional organs of speech -- and glanced, by way of eye-movement-intention, at the screen beside her, a graph of the recent history of Bunker time versus realtime.
Observing the Bunker -- "being in it" would have been an overstatement -- was the most computing-efficient state a Copy could adopt, short of losing consciousness. Peer's body was no longer being simulated at all; the essential parts of his model-of-a-brain had been mapped into an abstract neural network, a collection of idealized digital gates with no pretensions to physiological verisimilitude. He didn't enter this state very often, but Bunker time was still a useful standard as a basis for comparisons. At best -- on the rare occasions when demand slackened, and he shared a processor cluster with only two or three other users -- his Bunker-time slowdown factor dropped to about thirty. At worst? Up until a few minutes ago, the worst had been happening: a section of the graph was perfectly flat. For more than ten hours of real time, he hadn't been computed at all.
Kate said, "Operation Butterfly. Weather control simulations. The fuckers bought up everything."
She sounded shaken and angry. Peer said calmly, "No great loss. Solipsist Nation means making your own world, on your own terms. Whatever the risks. Real time doesn't matter. Let them give us one computation per year. What would it change?
Nothing.
"
He glanced at another display, and realized that he'd only been in the skyscraper model for seven subjective minutes. The false memories had meshed perfectly; he would never have believed it had been so short a time. Pre-computing the memories had taken time, of course -- but far less than it would have taken to accumulate the same effect by conventional experience.
Kate said, "You're wrong. You don't --"
"Let them run
one moment
of model time for
one Copy
on every processor cluster, the day it's commissioned -- and then dedicate it entirely to other users. Each Copy would thread its way from machine to machine, with a slowdown of a few billion . . .
and it wouldn't matter.
The manufacturers could run us all for free -- turn it into a kind of ritual, a blessing of the hardware by the spirits of the dead. Then we could abolish all the trust funds, and stop worrying about money altogether. The cheaper we are, the less vulnerable we are."
"That's only half the truth. The more we're marginalized, the more we're at risk."
Peer tried to sigh; the sound that emerged was plausible enough, but the lack of sensation was annoying.
"Is there any reason to stay in emergency mode? Is there some snap decision I'm going to have to make? Are there missiles heading for --" He checked a display. "-- Dallas?"
Dallas?
The US dollar must have fallen sharply against the yen.
Kate said nothing, so Peer glanced at icons for a body and a room, and willed them to be active. His disembodied consciousness, and the floating screens of the Bunker, fleshed out into a young man, barefoot in blue jeans and a T-shirt, sitting in a windowless control room -- what might have been the operations center for a medium-sized office building.
The body's physiological state continued directly from its last moments on the wall of the skyscraper -- and it felt good: loose-limbed, invigorated. Peer recorded a snapshot, so he could get the feeling back again at will. He looked at Kate imploringly; she relented and joined him, vanishing from the screen and appearing on a chair beside him.
She said, "I
am
Solipsist Nation. What happens outside doesn't matter to me . . . but we still need certain guarantees, certain minimum standards."
Peer laughed. "So what are you going to do? Become a lobbyist now? Spend all your time petitioning Brussels and Geneva? "Human rights" are for people who want to play at being human. I know who I am. I am
not
human." He plunged his fist into his chest, effortlessly penetrating shirt, skin and ribs, and tore his heart out. He felt the parting of his flesh, and the aftermath -- but although aspects of the pain were "realistic," preprogrammed barriers kept it isolated within his brain, a perception without any emotional, or even metabolic, consequences. And his heart kept beating in his hand as if nothing had happened; the blood passed straight between the ragged ends of each broken artery, ignoring the "intervening distance."
Kate said, "Blink and ten hours are gone. That's no disaster -- but where is it heading? State-of-emergency decrees, nationalizing all the computing power in Tokyo for weather control?"
"Tokyo?"
"Some models show Greenhouse Typhoons reaching the Japanese islands in the next thirty years."
"Fuck Tokyo. We're in Dallas."
"Not any more." She pointed to the status display; exchange-rate fluctuations, and the hunt for the cheapest QIPS, had flung them back across the Pacific. "Not that it matters. There are plans for the Gulf of Mexico, too."
Peer put his heart on the floor and shrugged, then groped around in his chest cavity in search of other organs. He finally settled on a handful of lung. Torn free, the pink tissue continued to expand and contract in time with his breathing; functionally, it was still inside his rib cage. "Start looking for
security,
and you end up controlled by the demands of the old world. Are you Solipsist Nation, or not?"
Kate eyed his bloodless wound, and said quietly, "Solipsist Nation doesn't mean dying of stupidity. You take your body apart, and you think it proves you're invulnerable? You plant a few forced-perspective memories, and you think you've already lived forever? I don't want some cheap illusion of immortality. I want the real thing."
Peer frowned, and started paying attention to her latest choice of body. It was still recognizably "Kate" -- albeit the most severe variation on the theme he'd seen. Short-haired, sharp-boned, with piercing gray eyes; leaner than ever, plainly dressed in loose-fitting white. She looked ascetic, functional, determined.
She said -- mock-casually, as if changing the subject -- "Interesting news: there's a man -- a visitor -- approaching the richest Copies, selling prime real estate for second versions at a ludicrous rate."
"How much?"
"Two million ecus."
"What -- per month?"
"No. Forever."
Peer snorted. "It's a con."
"And outside, he's been contracting programmers, designers, architects. Commissioning -- and paying for -- work that will need at least a few dozen processor clusters to run on."
"Good move. That might actually persuade a few of the doddering old farts that he can deliver what he's promising. Not many, though. Who's going to pay without getting the hardware on-line and running performance tests? How's he going to fake that? He can show them simulations of glossy machines, but if the things aren't real, they won't crunch. End of scam."
"Sanderson has paid. Repetto has paid. The last word I had was he'd talked to Riemann."
"I don't believe any of this. They all have their own hardware -- why would they bother?"
"They all have a high profile. People
know
that they have their own hardware. If things get ugly, it can be confiscated. Whereas this man, Paul Durham, is nobody. He's a broker for someone else, obviously -- but whoever it is, they're acting like they have access to more computing power than Fujitsu, at about a thousandth of the cost. And none of it is on the open market. Nobody officially knows it exists."
"Or unofficially. Because it doesn't.
Two million ecus!"
"Sanderson has paid. Repetto has paid."
"According to your sources."
"Durham's getting money from somewhere. I spoke to Malcolm Carter myself. Durham's commissioned a city from him, thousands of square kilometers -- and none of it passive. Architectural detail everywhere down to visual acuity, or better. Pseudo-autonomous crowds -- hundreds of thousands of people. Zoos and wildlife parks with the latest behavioral algorithms. A waterfall the size of nothing on Earth."
Peer pulled out a coil of intestine and playfully wrapped it around his neck. "You could have a city like that, all to yourself, if you really wanted it -- if you were willing to live with the slowdown. Why are you so interested in this con man Durham? Even if he's genuine, you can't afford his price. Face it: you're stuck here in the slums with me --
and it doesn't matter."
Peer indulged in a brief flashback to the last time they'd made love. He merged it with the current scene, so he saw both Kates, and the new lean gray-eyed one seemed to look on as he lay on the floor gasping beneath his tangible memory of her earlier body -- although in truth she saw him still sitting in the chair, smiling faintly.