EPILOGUE
August
There's a world I know where the women are a head taller than the men and file their ferocious teeth to points. The men are no less fierce.
A different world, yet the same, another Earth, has luminous rings spread brilliantly across the whole sky, bright as a full moon. Those rings are all that remained of the Moon when it fell chaotically too close to the world and got torn apart by tidal forces. There are no people there, only about twenty million different kinds of dinosaurs in a range of sizes and colors. Lots of them are meat-eaters with shockingly bad breath.
On a third world, the people are lean and lightly furred. The pale pupils of their eyes are slitted vertically. I believe their remote ancestors, maybe fifteen million years ago, were the great Ice Age cats now extinct in our world. All the apes and humans are extinct in theirs. Has any among them managed the trick of slipping here through the mirrored cracks between the worlds? If so, perhaps they gave rise to legends of vampires or werewolves. I don't think any of them came here, though. They love the taste of simian blood, which is why the apes and humans are extinct in their earth. We'd have noticed them, trust me.
On a fourth, the humans are gone, but machines are everywhere. Evolution by other means. Same old, same old, but different. Always different.
And in all of them, by and by, we Players still stroll, connive, or run for our lives. So do the Kether machines, driven by tempestuous emotional motives I have begun to understand at last. I like to kill them, even knowing the contrivance of our game, our gnostic Contest.
The endless hazard, of course, is that they'll kill me first, and those I love. That's no abstract threat. I've been dead, as you know, and I assure you, alive is better. Even a partial and dubious life.
You might not suppose I have the appearance of a Player in the Contest of Worlds to look at me. I'm just this tall Aussie walking down the street, booting a loose plastic bottle cap into the gutter, hands in my pockets, floppy hair in my brown eyes, looking a bit wary. Yes, I have that soft leather glove on my right hand, but people assume it's a personal quirk, like a nose ring or a data wearable, or maybe that it hides a nasty burn, which I guess comes closest. Other than that, for now, just another graduate philosophy student dressed in black: fashion uniform in this place. It's enough.
***
That is how this world, this world of worlds, came to pass—and why I end, as always, here, with my beloved Lune.
AFTERWORD
Many readers (I'm one) are as likely to start reading a book at the end as the beginning—if it has an afterword. In this case, I should warn you not to do so. Here, as the old dragon-haunted maps didn't quite say, There Be Spoilers!
The frame for this quasi-fantasy and the novel preceding it, Godplayers, is threefold. As I acknowledged in the first volume, these books are a kind of tribute to many of the science-fiction and fantasy novels and even comic strips I enjoyed when science fiction was already old but I was young. Now that I'm much older myself, many of those wonderful stories have drifted out of sight. The writers' names are not always forgotten, but they have been eclipsed by the mass-market success of derivative movies and TV series. So here's another tip of the hat to the good old stuff, and especially to the late Roger Zelazny (especially for Isle of the Dead).
Another part of the frame—really the most important, my key—is the idea of technological singularity, an insight first framed by Dr. Vernor Vinge twenty years ago. Such a singularity, which I sometimes call the Spike, is quite likely to hit the human species within the next half-century or even sooner. These novels are an attempt to deal with that looming experience from a sideways angle of attack. Think of them as allegory, if you like, as long as you have fun with them. But allegory is always serious at the core.
The third part is the fertile novelty of science itself. As I noted in the afterword to Godplayers, the Hubble telescope, the Chandra X-ray observatory, and a dozen other superb instruments have scanned the depths of space and time, mapping the very birth of our cosmos. Mathematicians and physicists sketch out testable theories based on this new data, revealing that the universe has not just grown from an explosion of the vacuum less than fourteen billion years ago—now it expands ever faster, galaxies shoved away from each other by impalpable dark energies, the lambda factor. It starts to seem plausible that our local universe is no more than one infinitesimal bubble in an infinite expanse of universes, most of them utterly strange, marked by different fundamental constants and laws.
Perhaps the deepest and most challenging interpretation of these new data and theories is the computational cosmos. The infinite expanse of the multiverse, this theory claims, is not only subject to mathematical modeling, it is at bottom a discretized computation. This audacious idea was proposed in detail by Konrad Zuse (who built the first programmable computers in the period from 1935 to 1941 and devised the first higher-level programming language in 1945), elaborated by Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber, and explored by other brilliant thinkers such as Edward Fredkin, Dr. Max Tegmark, and Stephen Wolfram.
If the universe is a computation, is it possible that it is also a simulation, as the Matrix trilogy proposed (echoing a long history in science fiction of the same idea, notably in Greg Egan's Permutation City)? The key academic proponent of this daring notion is Oxford University's Dr. Nick Bostrom. With his kind permission, I'm going to quote at some length from his important and germinal paper on the topic, http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html, "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" published in Philosophical Quarterly (2003), Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255. Bostrom opens with the entirely plausible proposition "that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future" (the principal postulate leading toward the idea of a singularity) and argues:
One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious... Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race... If this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones... If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence. The physics in the universe where the computer is situated that is running the simulation may or may not resemble the physics of the world that we observe. While the world we see is in some sense real, it is not located at the fundamental level of reality...
In some ways, the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation: the posthumans created the world we see; they are of superior intelligence; they are omnipotent in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws; and they are omniscient in the sense that they can monitor everything that happens. However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels.
Further rumination on these themes could climax in a naturalistic theogony that would study the structure of this hierarchy, and the constraints imposed on its inhabitants by the possibility that their actions on their own level may affect the treatment they receive from dwellers of deeper levels. For example, if nobody can be sure that they are at the basement-level, then everybody would have to consider the possibility that their actions will be rewarded or punished, based perhaps on moral criteria, by their simulators. An afterlife would be a real possibility. Because of this fundamental uncertainty, even the basement civilization may have a reason to behave ethically. The fact that it has such a reason for moral behavior would of course add to everybody else's reason for behaving morally, and so on, in truly virtuous circle
. One might get a kind of universal ethical imperative, which it would be in everybody's self-interest to obey, as it were from nowhere.
In addition to ancestor-simulations, one may also consider the possibility of more selective simulations that include only a small group of humans or a single individual. The rest of humanity would then be zombies or shadow-people humans simulated only at a level sufficient for the fully simulated people not to notice anything suspicious.
These are terrifying ideas if you take them seriously, even just for the sake of argument. It is a disturbing fact that some defendants in very serious crimes, including murder, have already appealed to what is called "the Matrix defense." The Boston Globe reported several years ago that in May 2000, Vadim Mieseges, a twenty-seven-year-old Swiss exchange student and former mental patient, skinned and carved up his landlady because she was emitting "evil vibes" and he was afraid of being "sucked into the Matrix." Two years later, bartender Tonda Lynn Ansley shot her landlady three times with a handgun. She argued that "they commit a lot of crimes in 'the Matrix'... That's where you go to sleep at night and they drug you and take you somewhere else." In February 2003, Virginian Joshua Cooke gunned down his parents with a 12-gauge and blamed it on the Matrix. This looks like courtroom opportunism, but might become menacingly prevalent as the idea of the computational cosmos spreads. One has to hope that with the increased intelligence of an AI-driven singularity, we will gain, as well, enhanced command of our ideas and our emotions.
Two other important sources of ideas and material are my friends Robert Bradbury and Dr. Anders Sandberg, two polymaths who have done a lot of serious and playful work on future directions life might take in an ever-complexifying cosmos. Bradbury's fertile, mind-boggling analysis of a Matrioshka star—an M-Brain, or embedded system of Dyson spheres each made from a different kind of "computronium" sucking up all the heat and light of a central star—should be explored more widely by astronomers seeking evidence of stealthed alien life in the cosmos. There is food for thought in Bradbury's and Milan Cirkovic's 2005 paper, "Galactic Gradients, Postbiological Evolution and the Apparent Failure of SETI," at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0506l10. And Juni's "offogs" are a version of Dr. J. Storrs Hall's fertile notion of utility fog (see his book Nanofutures: What's Next for Nanotechnology, Prometheus Books, 2005), with a wink at Eric Frank Russell's classic goofy tale, "Allamagoosa" (1955).
As always, I thank the English Department of the University of Melbourne, where I am a senior fellow. I owe an immense debt to the Literature Board of the Australia Council, whose generous grant in 2004 through 2005 helped support me as I worked on these complex novels. Arthur Lortie very kindly provided me with copies of Brick Bradford comic books that I hadn't seen in nearly half a century, and rocket scientist Spike Jones offered useful chess and astronomical information. I'm grateful to a number of early readers of portions of the books for useful hints, corrections, and nice ideas, Liz Martin, Paul Voermans, and my editor, John Oakes, for keen-eyed reading and suggestions, and especially my dear wife, Barbara Lamar, whose love, enthusiasm, and support kept me pushing forward through infinitely many universes... and beyond!
Melbourne, Australia,
San Antonio, USA
2005
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
K-Machines Page 28