The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “They fail,” Jerry repeated. “But in what way?” He clarified: “By what standards do we call our trials a failure? What’s the end goal of what we’re trying to do?”

  Arvin shrugged. Another obvious question. “Full-scale emulation.”

  “What does that mean? Talk me through it.”

  Jerry had expected this baffled silence. He half feared they wouldn’t talk at all. At last Kim got them started.

  “You take a human brain . . .”

  They had done this before, in the early planning sessions, zooming out, as it were, to consider the full scope of their task. Why hadn’t they done so repeatedly through the years, Jerry wondered now; why hadn’t they paused more often to consider the big picture? Because Jerry had been in his office, buried in details.

  No matter. Gradually, communally, they reconstructed the procedure, feeling silly as they stated the obvious, yet knowing this could be helpful—a recapitulation of fundamentals, an inducement to clarity, and a nudge to creativity. So they began at the beginning, with the early work in the hospital, the removal of brains from patients, the embedding of the organs in polymer, the shipments that arrived by special courier. And on to the technical specs of their equipment, the “slicing and dicing machine” as they called it, the in-house computers. Jerry supplied prompts to keep the conversation on track. The concept was simple. But in their obsession with errata, they’d lost sight of big ideas.

  The donors hadn’t. They believed passionately in the feasibility of the project: accurate, true-to-life, whole-brain emulation. Machine simulation of the human mind. The uploading of identity to a digital platform.

  And with it, functional immortality.

  Take a brain—say, from a very rich entrepreneur who has recently died. Scan its internal structures with magnetic resonance imaging technology. Run a second, destructive scan by shaving away ultrathin slices of material, recording contours as you go. Run additional, targeted scans on chemical samples and critical clusters. Combine findings in the best computational equipment available. Voila: you’re ready to boot up a soul.

  “It should work,” Kim Naylor said. “The brain’s a physical structure, after all. If you can scan that structure in enough detail, you don’t need to know how it works. You just need to copy how it’s built.”

  “Technically,” said Chris, “it should be even easier than that.”

  Jerry nodded. This concept was crucial to their approach. They didn’t need to know everything about how the brain was built. Not the atomic structures. Not the details of molecular arrangements. Only the neural connections. The logical architecture.

  “But it doesn’t work,” Jerry said, and prompted, “So we do the scanning. What next?”

  The lab’s scanning equipment was automated. With high-precision airbearings, diamond knives, component miniaturization, and above all, massive parallelization, they could slice and dice their way through a brain, at high resolution, in four months. The modeling stage took nearly as long, beginning with coarsegrained readings and using compression algorithms and combinatorial techniques to integrate multiple scans with preloaded templates, refining distinguishing details.

  With a detailed model prepared, the next step was to build a virtual environment: a virtual body, a virtual world. The team’s work here focused on two key areas: the spinal cord and endocrine system, anything that could contribute to conscious experience. Mostly they toiled over hormones, biochemistry, whatever substances commonly passed through the blood-brain barrier.

  And as a final flourish, they architected a sensory reality, a kind of video-game environment, flush with sights and sounds.

  “So we convert real brains to virtual brains,” Jerry said, “and we put them in virtual bodies. And? What happens? Remember, we’re thinking big-picture.”

  “Nothing happens.” Chris expressed the frustration that had afflicted them all for months. “Well, technically, not nothing. You get a few flickers of activity. That’s all.”

  “A kind of seizure,” Marjorie said. “Fragmentation. Degradation.”

  They had seen it untold times. A brainscan was a virtual machine, like a computer running as a program on another computer. The scans they made appeared healthy at first. Synapses fired in complex chains of neural excitation. They operated like real organs: a triumph of simulated life.

  But within seconds, the simulations degraded. Patterns repeated. Networks fragmented. Flickers of activity scattered through the simbrains, like dwindling constellations of connectivity in a failing power grid.

  The brains shriveled into fits of recurring neural impulses. Slowly, even these withered. By the seven-minute mark, every model had ceased responding. Total crash.

  The scans were still intact. They could be run at any time, with the same result. They didn’t decay. They simply didn’t live. Like frozen corpses, the lab’s virtual brains were eternalized in virtual death.

  “I like Marjorie’s word,” Jerry said. “Seizure. What we’ve seen in these trials is like a fit, a loop. A hung program, stuck in the same futile patterns.”

  “But it should work.” Chris smacked the table. “We know that consciousness is dependent on these neural structures. We’re not writing programs; we’re not building artificial intelligence. We’re copying what already exists.”

  “And copying it,” Kim said, “with obsessive precision.”

  This had been their research focus for fifteen years. Resolution, accuracy, fidelity. Minds ran on an organic substrate, Jerry reasoned, so why couldn’t they run on a mechanical one? The question was how exact to make this reproduction. So he had steered his research toward two technical problems: 1) fidelity of the scanning methods, and 2) processing power of the simulating computers.

  As far as Jerry was concerned, they had licked both those challenges.

  “Kim’s right. We’ve taken our models way past critical resolution. We’ve reproduced the neural connections. We’ve modeled ion channels. We’ve captured neurotransmitter concentrations. We have high-res gridspaces for compartmentalized ephaptic effects. We have separate grids for extracellular chemical diffusions. We emulate phosphorylation states. We’ve even gotten into the proteome. As for our modeling hardware, it already has a capacity a hundred or so terabytes beyond what we think we should need. And it’s getting better.”

  “While the scans,” Marjorie said, “if anything, get worse.”

  “That’s the mystery,” Jerry said. “Our equipment gets better. Our techniques get better. Our models get better. But our simulations keep getting worse.”

  He didn’t say what didn’t need to be said. These virtual brains were the remains of real people, rich men and women who had contributed their cadavers to the project, expecting to die in a hospital bed and awaken in cyber-paradise.

  “It’s crazy.” Chris put his hands to his head, measuring the complexity of the structures inside. “It almost makes you think—”

  “What were you going to say, Chris?”

  “Well, maybe the skeptics are right. Maybe consciousness is too hard a problem. Maybe there’s something mysterious, subtle, that gives rise to consciousness . . . quantum effects, or a form of hypercomputation . . .”

  Chris didn’t utter the word that everyone, in this line of work, learned never to utter.

  But Arvin did.

  “Maybe consciousness is immaterial after all. Maybe people really do have souls.”

  “Or,” Jerry said, “maybe not.”

  Machines droned in the silence.

  “I’m going to try something,” Jerry said. “I’m going to try a little experiment. Bear with me. I’m going to ask you all a series of questions.”

  Their faces were placid, patient, not unwilling. Jerry turned first to Marjorie. “Marjorie, what day is your birthday?”

  Marjorie stared. “Um,” she began.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not a trick question. Go ahead, give the obvious answer.”

  “Okay.” Marjorie sounded he
sitant. “Well . . . I think . . . let’s say . . .” She squinted, at a loss, and surprised by her own confusion.

  “Never mind. We’ll move on to Chris. Chris, where did you grow up? What city? What state? Same as I told Marjorie, not a trick question. Just give an honest answer.”

  Chris looked at his hands in perplexity, then shrugged. “Well . . .” He hazarded a guess. “I’ll say . . . Kansas?”

  “Arvin, what was the name of your first girlfriend? Kim, what do you like to do for fun?” Jerry gave them each a moment to reply, then said, “No, that’ll do, don’t try to answer. The fact is, you don’t know the answers. None of you do. You’re just making stuff up.”

  He paced around the table. “Try this. Chris, how many lights are in this room? Go ahead and check. You can count them if you want. Take your time. But you can’t do it, can you? Marjorie, do this for me. Put your hand on the conference table. Feel it. Tell me, what is it made of? Wood? Laminate? Is it rough or smooth? Are your chairs cushioned? Is it warm in here, or cool? Are there paintings on the walls? How dirty is the carpet?”

  He stood by the door. “You have no idea, do you? You can’t tell, and I can’t tell either. None of us can answer, because the questions are unanswerable. The information simply doesn’t exist.”

  “Doctor Emery?” Arvin looked worried. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking,” Jerry said, “about what’s in Lab B–15.”

  They were silent as Jerry ushered them, in a group, out of the room, down the silent halls, to the door of Lab B–15. By the ID scanner they paused, huddled together like wary schoolchildren, while Jerry put his palm to the pad and grasped the handle. The others watched in a state of vague expectation as he waited for the beep of identification.

  “Doctor Emery?” Arvin, first to warn Jerry about the lab, was now first to try and dissuade him from entering. “Are you sure about this? Do you really want to know what’s in there?”

  “It’s not about knowing,” Jerry said. “The truth is, I already know.” He watched their faces, attentive for signs of confused emotion: dread, doubt, expectation, alarm. “Yes, I know, and you all know too. But that means nothing. Knowing is the easy part. Accepting, understanding, that’s the real challenge. Accepting what we’ve known all along to be true.”

  He opened the door.

  The air wafted out, sterilized and cool. The tile floors echoed Jerry’s footsteps. Nothing vanished, nothing disappeared.

  The contents of Lab B–15 were as Jerry had expected. The overhead lights, which had appeared dark on the security camera, were already shining when he opened the door. The cabinets and counters were officially undisturbed: no items moved, no containers opened. Nothing in the logs to indicate suspicious behavior.

  But Jerry found glassware smashed on the floor—and waded through a clutter of fallen equipment.

  In the center of the room, a body lay face down, legs akimbo, sprawled on the tiles.

  “I noticed it when I was running through the time logs,” Jerry said. “I should have been more alarmed, even then. Every number was precise and simple. Too precise. As if generated by a crude algorithm. My suspicions increased when I examined the view from the parking garage. At a glance, it seemed normal. But when I examined the details . . .”

  He circled the body with measured steps, proceeding counterclockwise around the splayed feet.

  “The housing parks, the highways, even the bushes in the desert, they were all laid out in simple patterns. Obvious shapes, cruder than reality. Like pictures in a children’s book. The looping, now, that was another clue. A repeating sequence, recurring with slight variations. Like another simple pattern, but this time arranged chronologically. When I looked at the test results, I was sure.”

  The others stood in a circle, one strange expression duplicated on each gaping face. It was the expression Arvin had worn outside the building, approaching Jerry on the front drive. It was the expression Kim had worn when she entered Jerry’s office. It was the expression of a person stupefied by sudden insight, like Poincaré arriving at his famous, wild surmise. They had known all along. They had been amazed by their knowledge. But they hadn’t been able to give voice to their knowledge—to tell Jerry the awful truth.

  Of course not. And Jerry shook his head. How could they tell me? I wasn’t ready to face the truth.

  Now he squatted, elbows on his knees, and faced the truth head-on.

  The body lay with one hand under its chest, pinned, clutching its shirt, twisting the fabric into tortured folds. The other hand had stretched out on the floor, fingers extended, as if reaching for the door at the back of the room. The eyes, if there had been eyes, would have stared at the door’s sign. But there were no eyes, no face, no mouth. The entire head had been removed.

  “How did it happen?” Jerry looked up. “Let me guess. Heart attack? People always told me I worked too hard.” He bit a knuckle. “Tightness in my chest. Shortness of breath. Lightheadedness, confusion. I’ve been feeling the symptoms all along. I took them as a warning of something about to happen. In fact, they were a clue as to what had already happened. A residual effect of my final experience—a memory of my mode of death.”

  It wasn’t a surprise. It was another of those things, subliminal facts, secret insights, that he seemed to have carried in himself all along.

  “And, naturally, I donated my remains to the project. Now that I think about it, I remember doing so: making the decision, signing the forms. Fifteen years ago. When all this began.”

  With the others watching, Jerry went to the back of the room. Server Room, read the sign on the door. Underneath that, someone had taped a handwritten sign, adding the nickname used around the lab.

  Freezer Room.

  Jerry pulled open the door. A kind of airlock lay beyond. It was cold in the freezer room, always cold. Aggressive climate control kept the temperature borderline arctic. A precaution. Heat buildup, and attendant equipment failure, was a major hazard for computation on this scale.

  On and on the machines extended, dark and somnolent in droning rows. These were merely the on-site machines—the lab made use of remote computers, too—but even so, they were intimidating in their abundance. The powerful fans made a constant hum—the only sound, besides human voices, that Jerry had heard all night.

  “I didn’t notice anything odd at first. I guess that’s how it always is. Only when I looked at things, really looked . . .”

  Jerry turned and pointed at Chris. “You couldn’t count the lights in the conference room—because there were no lights to count. Nothing but a vague source of illumination. A memory of light, nothing more. Same with the table, the carpet, the chairs. All the little things we seldom notice, but that are part of everyday life. All the subtle facts, the textures, details, specifics, that constantly surround us, but that we never attend to.”

  Jerry felt moved to correct himself: “All the things I never attend to.”

  He turned to Marjorie. “I never knew your birthday, Marjorie. I never learned a thing about Chris’s past—not the town he came from, not even the state. I never knew a single personal fact about any of you, or about the rest of the research team. I stayed in my office, and I stared at my notes, and I studied the test results, over and over. And that’s the only thing I remember, now. Which means it’s the only thing any of us remembers.”

  He walked the rows of server stacks. The others followed like obedient ducklings, trotting at his heels. Certain machines had been grouped in clusters, assigned to particular scans, particular brains. “Subjects,” the staff called these groupings. They looked like rude hardware, metal and wire. But each was the vestige of a whole human life.

  Jerry continued until he saw his own name, written, in typical lab-culture fashion, in gradstudent scrawl on a strip of masking tape. Doctor Emery, it read—stuck crookedly on the steel rack. They’d labeled him Doctor Emery. They’d left off his first name.

  But of course they had. He was cons
tructing all of this. And he would have wanted it that way.

  “So here we are,” Jerry said. “Or rather, here I am. A brain in a box. A ghost in a machine. Falling apart and winding down. Chris, Marjorie, Arvin, Kim—you always accused me of talking to myself. Now, it seems, that’s all I can do. All that’s left to me. Living inside my head, communicating with you—with a group of fantasies, reconstructions, memories. Inventions of an expired mind.”

  It was what he’d always wanted, and now it was all he had. The ultimate solitude, a perfect privacy. A chance to think, to meditate, to solve problems—locked alone in the shelter of his thoughts.

  So Jerry turned and faced them: their blank and witless eyes, their mute, attentive stares, their dumb obedience. In the humming hush of the server room, he fixated on these fading specters, these faltering memories, these relics of his all but nonexistent social life.

  “The question,” he said to them, “is what we do now?”

  They reacted with mild surprise. “Do?” Marjorie blinked. “If what you’re saying is right—is there anything we can do?”

  Jerry frowned. The fact of his death had been implicit all along, hinted at in warnings from the fringe of consciousness. Lab B–15 was a forbidden thought, containing a memory of his final moment. Gasping, dying, on an epoxy floor.

  It was clear, now, what must have happened. A few strong impressions had been seared into Jerry’s cortex. The memories of his final day of life. The symptoms of his fatal heart attack. A record of familiar routines. Arriving at his lab, reviewing his notes. The walk down the hall to Lab B–15, where he may have planned to visit the freezer room. And then—a gathering tightness in his chest.

  Later, when the research team had extracted his brain, scanned it, and activated the simulation, those memories had been awakened, a sketchy impression of Jerry’s last living moments. Sputtering, the fragments of his shattered mind could only cycle again and again, a broken recording stuck in set patterns. Very soon, the connections would break, the network disintegrate, the patterns decay.

  If the test results were any guide, Jerry knew, he had a few minutes, maybe only seconds. Subjectively, that amounted to a few more spasms of neural activity, frenzied flurries of recurrent thoughts. How many more times would he drive up to the parking garage, enter the building, ride the elevator down to confront, or fail to confront, the appalling fact of his death?