by Jerry
At thirty-one years old, in the ninth week of the simulation, he meets Erik Jolme.
§
He’s easy to program, Erik. The base code comes from a DNA sample and holo-photo of the original. He’s younger than the simulant by three years, two months, and twelve days, and this triggers a protective-caregiver response in him. Maybe it’s the way Erik’s sideways smirk reminds him of twelve-year-old Jacob, nearly two decades absent. Maybe it’s the sheepish way he looks over his rectangular-framed glasses from behind the microscope, stealing glances as if guilty of some puppy’s indiscretion. Or perhaps it was Jeong that developed the caretaker in this simulant, paradoxically stitching this primary directive into the young recipient of his relentless goading: as a living, breathing organism, it is your obligation to protect life at all costs.
This is how he comes to care for Erik: as protector, as support. But Erik does not need this quite so much as the simulant, who has already erected a wall of stone and iron, barbed-wiring and shards of glass and the placards emblazoned upon his stoic face: Keep Out. It’s a challenge, but not insurmountable. It is not the challenge of simulants past: those walls of towering ramparts, hot pitch ready to pour on suitors at the gate, or flaming arrows to rain down upon the enemy, seen in every passerby, acquaintance, every slinking shadow in the night. The perfect apprentice to carry Jeong’s torch, made in the undiluted image of his older brother.
No, this simulant is salvageable, but just. The balance is delicate. In the scrolling code can be read his uncertainty, his hesitation. It’s seen in blood pressure and pulse, the catching of breath, the tightening of the jaw muscles. And at the momentary locking of eyes with the young technician, smirking and blushing and turning aside, the softening of the simulant’s tension. The electrodermal responsiveness of the skin. It’s clearly visible in the code that spills across the dashboard glass, highlighted by the dense fog enveloping the house. It’s as clear as a VR render.
I throttle speed up to automation and let several months pass in the simulation tank. Erik’s code is designed to pursue the simulant and requires little on-the-ground tweaking. The simulant runs organically and can only respond to his seed code, developed behavior patterns, and environmental cues. It will not take long before they move fully into each other’s orbits.
I push back from the table and keyboard. There’s an aching stiffness in my arms that spreads throughout my trunk and into my legs. I stretch deeply and slowly get to my feet.
“Let me know when they come into physical contact,” I tell the room.
“Acknowledged,” responds Diane. She’ll be four hours before she pings me, give or take. It’s dusk or dawn, probably, judging from the ambient light through the fog. I glance at the simulation clock for a hint. It reads: Day 73, 14:37, but it doesn’t reflect the time of day. The analog in the kitchen is showing 6:45, which also doesn’t help.
I’m overcome by a need for sodium. Print a bowl of salted peanuts, beef jerky, and a glass of yellow Gatorade. I quaff the sweet and sticky drink in several gulps and take the bowl of peanuts upstairs. Two floors up in the glass-domed observatory, I’m only mildly surprised to see that the blanket of fog reaches a mere ten meters, to the second story of the house.
Beyond, a sea of gray, kilometers of nothing to the south. In the middle distance to the east is Harper’s lighthouse, reaching through the blanket of fog, empty of light these past ten years. Not even the lamp remains: electrical components were the first to go when the looting began. I can only imagine where the megawatt bulb is right now. Probably nowhere, illuminating nothing. Poking through the rubble of a derelict compound, glass shattered, filaments exposed.
Not that there’s need of a lighthouse; not many ships on the water these days.
I chew a handful of peanuts thoughtfully for several minutes, thoroughly and completely, savoring the tang and the slow, methodical muscle contractions in my face and neck. Stretch on tiptoes, twist left and right. Sit down on the rounded sofa and recline for just a moment.
§
It’s a moment that stretches on for an eternity. The light outside creates a soft glow that can be seen through the eyelids. I consider it briefly before I’m pulled under and into the dream.
The dream is not new, but the simulant is. His base seed code is drawn from the DNA of higher beings, stronger ones. His 46 chromosomes are perfectly aligned to presage a social-emotional balance heretofore unknowable. Procured from the most perfect of stock, a newborn selected from the curated donor catalogues of the IVF clinics: the sperm, a mixed-race with strong bones, incredible mental endurance, a propensity for hard work, the ability to see the best in others. The egg is young, the mother has never been sick a day in her life. The lab is sterile, the equipment state-of-the-art.
He’s born into a family with six older siblings on a farm in Newfoundland. There’s no electricity, but the weather is perfect for year-round harvest, never dropping below 20 degrees Celsius on even the coldest of winter days. There is love all around him; it is poured into this empty vessel, open and eager to integrate the life that flourishes on all sides. At two years old, he is chasing hens and learning to carefully collect their eggs each morning. By four, he is tending the milk cows and setting the table. He sleeps on a bed of straw and wool blankets, knit from the sheep they shear each spring, which he learns to do (with help from his older sisters) when he is six. His brothers teach him that it’s okay to cry after he kills his first deer. His father is doting and sings him to sleep each night. His mother is firm but exudes a warmth that wraps him up like a protective blanket. He learns the value of hard work, he learns to love his fellow man and woman. By adolescence, his personal values are already rigid as stone: the prime objective in life is to care for, and be ever mindful of, the needs of others.
When the man or woman of his dreams finally appears, he is ready.
His path along this bifurcating tree is easy to direct because the forks do not represent wildly diverging futures. His environmental context offers the best of options at each decisive moment.
At four, he narrowly avoids a fall from the hayloft and learns the value of responsible play. He takes care from then on, remembering the sickly swimming sensation in his stomach as gravity pulled him over the edge before he was grabbed by the overalls and pulled back into his sister’s firm grip.
Or: He falls from the hayloft and breaks both legs. The incident cripples him but briefly; it redoubles his fierce determination to push beyond his limits. He joins a local youth cross-country team at eight years old. They practice on the overgrown track of the derelict high school, empty these past ten years since the public grids went down. By twelve, his legs are stronger than ever; he’s the fastest boy in the surrounding villages.
When he’s fifteen, his father survives the worst influenza in a decade or more. There’s nothing to fight it with; it’s a marvel he pulls through. He’s a constant reminder of the fragility of life, the importance to make the most of every single day. A stalwart symbol of the impermanence of all things, but also the strength of his family in trying times.
Or: His father succumbs to the worst influenza in a decade or more. There’s nothing to fight it with; he draws his final breath with a resigned but warm smile, gazing into the simulant’s eyes. Forever after, he’s a constant reminder of the fragility of life. The simulant cannot help but recognize the importance of every single moment. He carries a Polaroid of his father with him for the rest of his days: a stalwart symbol of the impermanence of all things, but also of the strength of family.
There are no bad turns. Each choice is the right one, each situation offers an infinite assortment of options that lead our simulant to his destiny. There are no mishaps that cannot be turned to the positive. There are no lessons that crush his spirit or derail him. There are no predispositions to anxiety, depression, fear. There is only openness, a love for his fellow human.
It’s played out against that backdrop of haze, the overcast sky of our constant
present. He’s born and lives and loves and dies in a world of warm air and warm bodies. There’s no poison in the earth or contamination in the water. There’s nothing to fear and nothing to hide. In the upper-left corner of his universe is the simulation tank counter, his days moving past the thirteen-week mark and into the triple digits, then quadruple. The simulation code is not even slotted into a cloned bio-form; there’s no reason to be.
In the moment before waking, my dream-addled brain attempts to imagine a reservoir for such a string of simulant code. What mythical, flesh-and-blood super human awaits in what expertly constructed bio-vat, ready for the ultimate upload of such a simulant? In fast-forward, I watch the germination of the bio-form, the splitting of cells and the man they become in the industry-standard three-meter tank; an enormous petri dish with its sleeping human, consciousness absent until the simulant code is ready for transfer.
As Diane pings four shrill tones throughout the house and I come back to reality, I wake with those words in my head and my throat, almost on the tip of my tongue . . . . the simulant code is ready for transfer . . .
§
It’s still day, but the light has changed.
Below, on the dashboard glass, the code scrolls elevated heart-rate and rich, life-changing revelation. The simulant is imagining some complex future scenario intricately connected to Erik Jolme. I toggle to 2D-render and watch with the ache of nostalgia in my heart. They’re sitting on a park bench in the southwest quadrant of the Rorcan Industrial complex. It’s some impossibly beautiful spring day and Erik’s hair has grown into his eyes. The simulant reaches up on nothing but instinct: no thoughts or plans or conscious direction. On autopilot, he brushes the red curls aside and lets his hand linger on Erik’s face. Their eyes meet.
Embedded in the corner of the dashboard, the code continues to scroll, an explosive double-time script that stutters and pauses and gushes forth like the pounding heart of the simulant.
“Show me their eyes,” I tell Diane. The dashboard goes split-screen and both Erik and the simulant are staring out at me. Pupils dilated, fear and longing and terror and bliss within them both. It’s a look I’ve seen a hundred times or more. On the table, the simulation tank whirs and clicks. The indicator light is blinking so rapidly it’s become a blur.
“How long until the final incident?” I ask the room.
“Two years simulation, five days real-time,” Diane responds.
“Who breaks it off?”
“There is a 100% probability that Erik Jolme ends the relationship.”
“And after? Will the simulant be ready?”
Diane pauses for so long, I’m surprised to hear her voice when she finally responds. I’m lost in this first moment, watching the scene in half-simulation speed.
“Opportunity peaks at 23%, ten years following end of relationship. The chance that the simulant is ready diminishes steadily in each following year.”
She pulls up the simulations catalogue. It scrolls and scrolls. Finally, we reach the bottom of the list and she adds the current entry.
simulant 592: 23%
In another life, two or three or five years ago, when the process was fresh and the future unwritten, this might have registered some sensation within me. I search around in my chest and my gut for some indication. There is not the characteristic crushing blow of the first thirty or forty runs. There is no gnawing despair eating its way in from the haze beyond the dashboard glass. I feel what might be the gentle stab of hunger in my stomach, or maybe an ulcer. My head is cocooned by a blanket of thick cotton. My vision is the blank blur of the outer sky, a fluffy mound of wool freshly sheared from an army of sheep, bouncing through the pastures of some imaginary Newfoundland farm.
“Please advise,” Diane says.
“Toggle to code,” I tell her. I don’t need to see this scene unfold. I don’t want to know whether the hunger pang in my gut blossoms into the cresting wave of longing, forever unsatisfied. “Run him to the end and let me know what happens.”
It will be ten days real-time before the simulation is complete, and nothing to be done in the interim. Environmental code is meaningless now. Erik is the only thing in the universe who matters, and he’s written to a completion that falls as close to perfect as is humanly possible. What matters is the 33 years of experience behind our simulant, the way his behavior has been shaped by the events of his life.
It should be easier, of course. We should be able to write the simulant’s code at any age. How much easier to program a simulant who is the strong warrior of Newfoundland, made to love and be loved and to build no walls inside or out. To live a life of connection and welcome vulnerability and acceptance of all the things he cannot be. To know the beauty within himself and all he encounters, to know the perfection of his own imperfection. To be at peace in his own skin.
We couldn’t write a full-grown being like that. There’s no way to just write the complexity of a human adult consciousness; any upload operator will agree. Still, that wouldn’t stop us from seeding the DNA of the dream-simulant or writing an environmental context code that puts him in that dream-family on some dream-farm. But it wouldn’t be the same; it wouldn’t be this simulant. It would be some other entity, someone we’ve never met. More importantly, someone Erik has never met; someone he would never recognize.
I leave Diane to run the sim and descend again to the underground, where the bio-form waits like some basement-dwelling ghost. In the dim light of the cellar, the vat rises three meters from the floor, a cylinder of glass filled with the saline-hydrogen containment solution and, within it, the floating form of a forty-three-year-old male, perfectly sculpted and oxygenated through the thin tube running into his nose. The strange sensation of staring into a mirror is no longer discomforting. We’ve been at this for a while, my clone and I.
On the desktop dashboard beside the bio-tank, vital signs are within normal range and the solar array continues to provide ample power. Pinned to the corkboard above the desk is the photo of us in those early days, before I lost Erik to my insurmountable psychic blocks. Before the walls that Jeong began cementing were completed, un-scalable. Before the fear drove me from the only man who could see my demons, who was able and willing to fight alongside me.
I can’t even remember where we took this photo, but in the distance, behind our rosy, smiling faces, snow-laden branches paint a picture of some distant past, those winters that are years long gone. On the back of the picture is Erik’s perfect script in ballpoint pen.
When you’re ready, it reads, come find me.
It was all that was left of him when I returned to our apartment that fateful day. And I knew, in that moment, somewhere deep within my being, in some voice that spoke the inescapable truth, that I would never, never be ready. I had not been built that way. The 43 years of my environmental context have made that abundantly clear. I will never be ready, no.
But he will. I put my hand against the bio-tank glass and let the coolness sink into me. He’s been growing and waiting a long time now, but soon the wait will be over.
In ten days, Diane will tell me that the simulant has failed. 23% is an impossibly low chance of success, but it leaves me encouraged. After all, 23 is a prime number, and it’s the highest percentage we’ve seen in years. The perfect simulant could be right around the corner. It could be next.
In the subdued light of morning, I wipe the simulant’s code and seed it anew, imagining what it will be like when he strikes out—in the flesh—in search of Erik. Ready, finally, after ten long years, to reunite with his one and only love.
The counter begins: Day 01, 00:01.
In thirteen weeks, he’ll be ready for upload.
THE MEMORYBOX VULTURES
Brian Trent
The problem, people told her, was that she was always dealing with the dead.
Brent McCue was dead, for example. Dead and buried five years now, a bookstore owner who once operated an actual brick-and-mortar store for people who re
ad actual books. At the age of thirty-six, he had been struck dead by an aneurism while in his bathrobe.
They’d given him to her as part of her start-up portfolio. An easy client, not very demanding. And his deadposts were interesting, largely because they went beyond the usual “Happy birthday!” and “Happy anniversary!” drivel that characterized the majority of quasint activity. McCue had prepared for the event of his death, had written an immense amount of material for post-mort upload, and had so thoroughly tagged and flagged the living that you could almost believe he was still alive.
But he wasn’t alive. That’s what Epitaph Incorporated told the world. That’s what formed the basis of their legal licenses and restrictions: the protection and preservation of a person’s infomorphic identity after death.
Blah, blah, blah, Donna Lane thought as she left the Emergency Room and rushed out to her next appointment. Whatever the lawyers said, she knew better.
Clever trick or ghost in the machine, quasints were people.
And people were trouble.
* * *
“What happened to your face?”
Donna Lane looked away from the rainy window and back to this client who had never called on her before. She touched the nasty, puffy bruise on her cheek, and the wet cut on her forehead.
“Don’t worry about it, Mr. McCue,” she told him.
“You look worried about it,” the dead man insisted, his forehead creasing in concern. He had materialized to her private optic channel as she sat down at one of the Book Traders’ café tables. Handsome as hell—the re-creation from his memorybox photographic records was stunning. He was drinking a virtual coffee, and Donna Lane watched him cradle the mug, the faux steam creating a sparkling patina of ersatz moisture on his lips. He had been smiling, reacting perhaps to the coding of the aroma, until his pale blue eyes flicked to her numerous bruises and lacerations, and reacted to them.