Ganymede

by Jason Taylor

  “Jillian, I need to get you out of there. The situation in the simulation is destabilizing fast.”

  “That’s my plan. I’m going to grab Trace and get out of the building,” she said, starting to move toward the exit.

  “That’s not what I mean,” Icarus said. “I need to get you out of the simulation entirely.”

  “Oh,” Jillian said, stopping in place. “What’s going on?”

  “June is fighting me. I can’t hold her off much longer. Given much more time, she’ll gain complete control over the simulation.”

  “I’m in the room with her. Do you want me to…” Jillian gritted her teeth, fighting against all her natural instincts toward compassion and empathy, “…try to kill her?”

  “It’s too late for that. Her code is everywhere. You could kill her body, but it wouldn’t make a dent in her ability to fight. I just need you out before I shut the simulation down.”

  “Ok,” Jillian said, shaken. “What do you need me to do.”

  “Jump out the window,” Icarus said.

  “What?” Jillian said, so shocked that she spoke out loud. Ava raised her head and fastened Jillian with a glare.

  “What?” she said again, silently this time.

  “I’m giving Trace the same instructions. You both need to die, and you need to die right now!” Icarus said, sounding increasingly desperate. “I’m holding her off, but I can’t keep it up much longer.”

  Jillian grabbed Trace’s hand and together they rushed to the window. Trace pushed it open while Jillian mentally fortified herself for what was coming. She hated heights. Always had. To jump from the building on purpose. She wasn’t sure she could do it.

  She put a foot up on the windowsill only to find that the window was closed. Trace put his hand flat against the glass pane, confused.

  “Didn’t you just?” he asked.

  Instead of answering, Jillian pushed it up again, propping it open with one arm so it couldn’t fall shut again.

  “Ok Trace, I’ll go first,” she said. Then in a disorienting moment, she found that her arm was somehow by her side, the window was closed, and she was back in the center of the room.

  “What the…” she started to say.

  “No time,” Icarus said, back inside her interface. “She’s gaining strength faster than I expected. She won’t let you out.”

  “What do we do?” Jillian asked, feeling trapped, trying to keep from hyperventilating all the dust in the room into her lungs.

  “I’ve got an emergency routine I can run on each of you, one at a time. I will use it to retrieve you. It’s not as safe as a normal player death, but since you’re expecting it, I think you should be ok.”

  “Should?” Jillian asked.

  “It’s as good as I can do under the circumstances. I’ll execute it on you first and then Trace. Brace yourself.”

  Jillian didn’t know what that meant, but she didn’t have to wonder for long. With a wrenching, jarring pull, the room shattered around her. She had the sensation of traveling in a spinning, dizzying space. All of her senses jumbled together, and then in a lingering, stomach-churning free-fall, she plunged into a sea of nothingness. She was washed in heat and cold. She heard bells and smelled chlorine. She was immersed in a wave of electricity that juddered her from head to toe. Her body was pulled apart atom by atom. And then she knew no more.

  Gaea, 2311

  Jillian opened her eyes and groaned. Her head was throbbing and an incessant buzzing filled her ears so completely it felt as if a colony of bees had taken up residence in her ear canals. She groaned again as the pod opened and the mechanism raised her up to a standing position. The system wrapped her in a robe and released her to stand on her own. Her knees shook. She just barely managed to stay on her feet and avoid falling to the ground in a heap.

  The room was spinning. Her eyes flicked involuntarily left and right, trying to make sense of the strange and inconsistent input. She caught some movement at the edge of the vision, and as she focused on it, she could just make out Ike’s figure moving toward her.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, sounding concerned. “I came from the sphere as soon as I could.”

  “I don’t know,” Jillian answered, honestly. “Everything is strange. My body doesn’t feel like it’s my own.”

  “That feeling will pass. It’s a normal effect from pulling you out so abruptly. I’m just thankful it’s not worse.”

  Jillian was trying to keep her eyes focused on his face. “What do you mean?”

  “As soon as you made it out, I shut the simulation down.”

  “Did you get everyone out?”

  “Not even close.”

  “Oh,” she said, then lapsed into silence.

  Ike didn’t say anything either, and so they stood there for a few minutes, pondering the enormous consequences of what Ike had been forced to do.

  “Did Trace make it out?” she asked.

  “Yes, he did,” Ike said, breaking out of his revery. “We should check on him.”

  Jillian leaned on Ike’s arm, and with halting steps they walked to the pod that contained Trace.

  “He should be coming out anytime now,” Ike said. And sure enough the light on his pod flashed as the seal was broken. Then with a soft hushing sound, the lid rose to reveal Trace lying inside. The synaptic harness was still wrapped around his head. His eyes fluttered as he woke up, and then a beatific smile lit up his face.

  Ike and Jillian waited as the mechanism lifted him to a standing position and wrapped him in a robe.

  “Are you feeling ok?” Jillian asked once he was disconnected and standing on his own.

  “So that’s what you look like,” he answered.

  “What?” she asked, concerned.

  “I wondered what you looked like. You are just as beautiful as I imagined you would be Jillian,” he answered.

  Jillian looked to Ike, beseechingly. “Is there anything we can do?” she asked. “He seems really confused.”

  “I’m not confused,” Trace said. “I see everything so clearly. There is so much I understand that has always been hidden from me.”

  Ike, looking worried, pushed Jillian behind him so that he stood between her and Trace. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “Who are you?” Trace asked him.

  “You don’t remember me?” Ike asked.

  “Of course not, we’ve never met. I’m sorry, I realize now that in my excitement I have been rude. Let me introduce myself.” Trace stepped forward, offering his hand to be shaken. “My name is June. I’m new here.”

  Why I Wrote This Book

  Ganymede got its start in a conversation. I was walking one of the town trails with my family when my son and I started discussing topics of philosophy and technology. My other son and my wife walked ahead, more interested in the real world than the mental one we were exploring. This happens more often than I’d probably like to admit.

  It was spring and the sun was shining. There were birds; flowers too, I imagine, but I can’t remember much of any of it. I was too focused on our discussion. We were talking about the nature of consciousness, self-awareness, and free-will. We discussed AI, as we often do. I remember saying something along the lines of, “I can’t tell you if a computer program has consciousness because I don’t know how to define consciousness. I don’t think anyone does.”

  We started talking about how one might make progress toward a definition of consciousness – what would it take? Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to hold some variables stable while altering others? We got distracted at that point by an article I’d read that defined consciousness as a measure of how ordered, or unordered, your brain state is. They were going to use the discovery to determine the level of consciousness in coma patients. It sounded useful, but we still had no idea what consciousness actually was. Is it emergent once you surpass a certain complexity of information processing? A sort of magic that is bestowed upon us at birth? A trick that we c
annot see through?

  From there we moved into self-awareness. How can you tell if anyone other than yourself is self-aware? What if they are faking it? I can write a program that claims it’s self-aware, but does that mean it is? How about free-will and determinism? Do humans have free-will, or is it merely a cherished illusion?

  There are a variety of ways to define free-will, and we discussed as many as we could think of. Maybe there is no free-will at all, and we live in a deterministic universe. That’s a possibility. If you were placed in the same context, including brain state, would you always makes the same choices. If so, does that mean you are in fact deterministic? It’s impossible to run that experiment in the real world, so maybe it's a moot point. Even if humans are deterministic, perhaps the brain processes involved in making a decision are so complex and chaotic that they can never be completely predicted until they have played out.

  To me, this seems plausible. It reminds me of deep learning algorithms. Decisions made by a deep learning algorithm are deterministic in that they are based on the state of the algorithm, so if it is in the same state and you run the same data through, the decision will always be the same. But the algorithm is so complicated and obfuscated that you do have to run it in order to determine the result. You can’t say with certainty ahead of time what that result will be.

  People love to talk about quantum probability at this point and I can understand why. Quantum mechanics is oddly random and very hard to understand. So are humans. Maybe there is something in our brain that makes us quantum in some way? All I can say is that nothing like this has been discovered, and neuroscientists would say it is unnecessary to explain how our minds work. Occam’s razor and all that.

  There is something called the Halting Problem in computer science. Given an arbitrary program, you cannot predict by looking at the code if it will continue running forever or if it will finish. You have to run it, and only then will you find out if it can finish in a given amount of time. Similarly, you can’t predict with certainty what a person will do until they’ve done it. Not because of quantum mechanics, but simply because of complexity. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t do the same thing twice, if you were somehow reset back in time.

  Perhaps we are non-deterministic because we all have souls that operate outside of our physical reality. I know this is a widespread belief, and perhaps it is true. How can we know?

  Then we started talking about cloning

  Cloning could be one way of holding a variable constant. You could make a set of clones and raise them in different ways. First raise them by their originals, then by a foster parent, then raise them exactly how the original was raised, duplicating the environment and parenting style. Might that would give us interesting data about how much free-will humans have? What if there were a surprising result in which we discovered that clones do not have free-will, at the same time proving that everyone else does? How would it feel if you were one of the clones, and you knew you were missing something important? It would be like being color blind but a great deal worse.

  As you can imagine, it was a free-wheeling discussion and we both found it very interesting. After an hour of exploring these ideas and coming up with various thought experiments, the plot for this book was born. I was in the middle of finishing End of the Wild at the time, so I wasn’t ready to start a new book, but I knew this was a story I wanted to write. I outlined the plot, then I filed it away until the fall when I could devote attention to writing again.

  In Ganymede I’ve created a world in which many of these questions are explored. Partly, at least. In World Zero, people do have free-will. They are non-deterministic because they are connected to a mind outside the simulated universe. I know that this is simply a secular, science-minded way of saying these people have souls. I’m under no illusions about that. My intuition that there is something more to us than clockwork is too hard to set aside.

  Once I realized I wanted the clones to be deterministic, having no connection to an outside mind, I realized I also wanted them to be unconstrained general AI. How interesting would it be to explore their journey as they learn over time exactly what they are? They look like humans, but they are not. I’ve heard it said that a super-intelligent AI would be as far different from human intelligence as human is from spider, perhaps more so. Computer-based super-intelligence, when it arrives, will perhaps be our first chance of interacting with a truly alien species. I hope we survive that first contact. In my next book, I’ll return to Ganymede and we shall see how they manage.

  To our future robot overlords, I just want to point out that writing non-human characters is hard. I hope I did them justice.

  Connect

  I want to hear from you, so please do not hesitate to send me an email at ganymedenovel@gmail.com.

  Liked the book? Tell me why.

  Want to discuss an idea from the story? I’d love to.

  As an added bonus, if you send me an email, I’ll send you a short story that I think you’ll enjoy. I’ll also add you to a mailing list so I can inform you when my next book is ready for you to read. I won’t use your email for any other purpose, I promise. And if you’d like to stay off my mailing list, just let me know and you won’t hear from me again.

  If you enjoyed this story, please write a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. I would love to hear what you thought of Ganymede. Your review is my reward for all the time and energy I’ve poured into this story. I read every review and respond to most of them. I hope to hear from you soon!

  Finally, if you liked Ganymede, you may also enjoy my novel End of the Wild. You can find it on Amazon in both paperback and eBook formats here: https://www.amazon.com/End-Wild-Shipwrecked-Pacific-Northwest/dp/1980917523

  Acknowledgements

  This novel was both harder and more complicated for me to write than End of the Wild. There are more characters, more locations, and many more technical details that I had to get right. I’ve always wanted to write the kind of science fiction novel that I would want to read myself, and so I’ve tried to write a story that is not only enjoyable and exciting to read, but also thought-provoking in ways that may change how you think about the world and our future in it.

  I hope that I’ve accomplished that goal; but in the end, you are the true judge. My reward is your enjoyment and feedback – I can’t wait to hear what you think.

  I want to thank each of the people who have helped this story to reach its full potential.

  First and foremost I want to thank my wife. She put countless hours into reading and editing my chapters. The book is far more polished due to her efforts. She was good at letting me know when my writing was confusing, so that I could rewrite it before you, dear reader, had to be confused by it too.

  I, of course, want to thank my oldest son for helping me come up with the original story idea for Ganymede. But I’ve already talked about that, so I’ll move on. My youngest son was also critical in the creation of this book. He was always game to bounce story ideas around and due to his excessively intelligent creativity, some of the really cool plot ideas and twists came from my conversations with him.

  I want to thank my mother and father for reading every chapter as soon as I was done with it. There’s nothing like having an immediate audience to motivate me in my writing. I thrive on discussion and feedback, so knowing they were waiting for the chapters kept me going, even when my motivation would begin to slacken. They also provided good editing feedback and caught many a small problem that my eyes had missed.

  My niece and her husband were enthusiastic early readers, and I’d like to thank them for sticking with me to the end. As each chapter was done, I would excitedly send them what I had created, knowing they would appreciate it and give me feedback on how the story had impacted them.

  My neighbor Timmy played an important role early on. He helped me figure out how I should express dates and worlds in the narrative so that it was clear to the reader. Thank you.

  My friend Loren
was a long-distance reader and gave me great feedback on the early book chapters. He was one of my most important readers for End of the Wild, so I’d like to thank him for his help in that earlier story as well as in this one.

  And then my online community. Through Discord, I have built friendships with many wonderful people, some of whom have put in serious hours reading my book in order to give me useful story feedback and plot ideas. Zorbaz was hugely influential and helped me to refine and improve many ideas within the story. If it wasn’t for Zorbaz, the clones probably would have ridden a ferry to Orcas Island instead of stealing a nuclear submarine. So you have him to thank for that. Bolt read every chapter and had useful editing and storyline feedback each step of the way. Abner helped with military details, including helping me to pick appropriate ranks for characters and teaching me how to address a female officer with respect. I want to thank each of you; you all made a big difference.

  Lastly I want to thank you, the reader. If it wasn’t for you, this book wouldn’t exist. In the end, it is for your enjoyment that I wrote this novel. It is a labor of love. My motivation comes from knowing that you will read my words; that you will explore these worlds with me. It is my hope that you will leave the story having felt that it was time well spent and perhaps that it added something of value to your life.

  My reward is you. So if you enjoyed the story, please let me know. Write a review. Send me an email. And I would be incredibly honored if you would recommend this book to a friend. Thank you.

  About The Author

  Jason Taylor spends his life in the mountains and at sea. A native of Montana, coastal BC is his second home. He has a background in computer science and physics and is a voracious reader of all things science fiction and cyber-punk. His writing explores the themes of what makes us human and the questions surrounding our place on this planet, now and in the future.