by Greg Egan
She slowed down time a further hundredfold, almost freezing the turmoil, and then zoomed in to the same degree. The individual cubic cells which made up the Autoverse were visible now, changing state about once a second. Each cell’s “state” – a whole number between zero and two hundred and fifty-five – was recomputed every clock cycle, according to a simple set of rules applied to its own previous state, and the states of its closest neighbors in the three-dimensional grid. The cellular automaton which was the Autoverse did nothing whatsoever but apply these rules uniformly to every cell; these were its fundamental “laws of physics.” Here, there were no daunting quantum-mechanical equations to struggle with – just a handful of trivial arithmetic operations, performed on integers. And yet the impossibly crude laws of the Autoverse still managed to give rise to “atoms” and “molecules” with a “chemistry” rich enough to sustain “life.”
Maria followed the fate of a cluster of golden cells spreading through the lattice – the cells themselves didn’t move, by definition, but the pattern advanced – infiltrating and conquering a region of metallic blue, only to be invaded and consumed in turn by a wave of magenta.
If the Autoverse had a “true” appearance, this was it. The palette which assigned a color to each state was still “false” – still completely arbitrary – but at least this view revealed the elaborate three-dimensional chess game which underpinned everything else.
Everything except the hardware, the computer itself.
Maria reverted to the standard clock rate, and a macroscopic view of her twenty-one Petri dishes – just as a message popped up in the foreground:
JSN regrets to advise you that your resources have been diverted to a higher bidder. A snapshot of your task has been preserved in mass storage, and will be available to you when you next log on. Thank you for using our services.
Maria sat and swore angrily for half a minute – then stopped abruptly, and buried her face in her hands. She shouldn’t have been logged on in the first place. It was insane, squandering her savings playing around with mutant A. lamberti – but she kept on doing it. The Autoverse was so seductive, so hypnotic … so addictive.
Whoever had elbowed her off the network had done her a favor – and she’d even have her fifty-dollar log-on fee refunded, since she’d been thrown right out, not merely slowed down to a snail’s pace.
Curious to discover the identity of her unintentional benefactor, she logged on directly to the QIPS Exchange – the marketplace where processing power was bought and sold. Her connection to JSN had passed through the Exchange, transparently; her terminal was programmed to bid at the market rate automatically, up to a certain ceiling. Right now, though, some outfit calling itself Operation Butterfly was buying QIPS – quadrillions of instructions per second – at six hundred times that ceiling – and had managed to acquire one hundred per cent of the planet’s traded computing power.
Maria was stunned; she’d never seen anything like it. The pie-chart of successful bidders – normally a flickering kaleidoscope of thousands of needle-thin slices – was a solid, static disk of blue. Aircraft would not be dropping out of the sky, world commerce would not have ground to a halt … but tens of thousands of academic and industrial researchers relied on the Exchange every day, for tasks it wasn’t worth owning the power to perform in-house. Not to mention a few thousand Copies. For one user to muscle in and outbid everyone else was unprecedented. Who needed that much computing power? Big business, big science, the military? All had their own private hardware – usually in excess of their requirements. If they traded at all, it was to sell their surplus capacity.
Operation Butterfly? The name sounded vaguely familiar. Maria logged on to a news system and searched for reports which mentioned the phrase. The most recent was three months ago:
Kuala Lumpur – Monday, August 8th, 2050: A meeting of environmental ministers from the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) today agreed to proceed with the latest stage of Operation Butterfly, a controversial plan to attempt to limit the damage and loss of life caused by Greenhouse Typhoons in the region.
The long-term aim of the project is to utilize the so-called Butterfly Effect to divert typhoons away from vulnerable populated areas – or perhaps prevent them from forming in the first place.
Maria said, “Define ‘Butterfly Effect.’” A second window opened up in front of the news report:
Butterfly Effect: This term was coined by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the late nineteen seventies, to dramatize the futility of trying to make long-term weather forecasts. Lorenz pointed out that meteorological systems were so sensitive to their initial conditions that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could be enough to determine whether or not there was a tornado in Texas a month later. No computer model could ever include such minute details – so any attempt to forecast the weather more than a few days in advance was doomed to failure.
However, in the nineteen nineties the term began to lose its original, pessimistic connotations. A number of researchers discovered that, although the effects of small, random influences made a chaotic system unpredictable, under certain conditions the same sensitivity could be deliberately exploited to steer the system in a chosen direction. The same kind of processes which magnified the flapping of butterflies’ wings into tornadoes could also magnify the effects of systematic intervention, allowing a degree of control out of all proportion to the energy expended.
The Butterfly Effect now commonly refers to the principle of controlling a chaotic system with minimum force, through a detailed knowledge of its dynamics. This technique has been applied in a number of fields, including chemical engineering, stock-market manipulation, fly-by-wire aeronautics, and the proposed ASEAN weather-control system, Operation Butterfly.
There was more, but Maria took the cue and switched back to the article.
Meteorologists envisage dotting the waters of the tropical western Pacific and the South China Sea with a grid of hundreds of thousands of “weather-control” rigs – solar powered devices designed to alter the local temperature on demand by pumping water between different depths. Theoretical models suggest that a sufficient number of rigs, under elaborate computer control, could be used to influence large-scale weather patterns, “nudging” them toward the least harmful of a number of finely balanced possible outcomes.
Eight different rig prototypes have been tested in the open ocean, but before engineers select one design for mass production, an extensive feasibility study will be conducted. Over a three-year period, any potentially threatening typhoon will be analyzed by a computer model of the highest possible resolution, and the effects of various numbers and types of the as-yet nonexistent rigs will be included in the model. If these simulations demonstrate that intervention could have yielded significant savings in life and property, ASEAN’s ministerial council will have to decide whether or not to spend the estimated sixty billion dollars required to make the system a reality.
Other nations are observing the experiment with interest.
Maria leaned back from the screen, impressed. A computer model of the highest possible resolution. And they’d meant it, literally. They’d bought up all the number-crunching power on offer – paying a small fortune, but only a fraction of what it would have cost to buy the same hardware outright.
Nudging typhoons! Not yet, not in reality … but who could begrudge Operation Butterfly their brief monopoly, for such a grand experiment? Maria felt a vicarious thrill at the sheer scale of the endeavor – and then a mixture of guilt and resentment at being a mere bystander. She had no qualifications in atmospheric or oceanic physics, no PhD in chaos theory – but in a project of that size, there must have been a few hundred jobs offered to mere programmers. When the tenders had gone out over the network, she’d probably been busy on some shitty contract to improve the tactile qualities of beach sand for visitors to the Virtual Gold Coast – either that, or tinkering with the genome of A. lamberti, trying to becom
e the first person in the world to bludgeon a simulated bacterium into exhibiting natural selection.
It wasn’t clear how long Operation Butterfly would spend monitoring each typhoon – but she could forget about returning to the Autoverse for the day.
Reluctantly, she logged off the news system – fighting the temptation to sit and wait for the first reports of the typhoon in question, or the response of other supercomputer users to the great processing buy-out – and began reviewing her plans for a new intruder surveillance package.
Chapter 2
(Remit not paucity)
November 2050
“What I’m asking for is two million euros. What I’m offering you is immortality.”
Thomas Riemann’s office was compact but uncluttered, smartly furnished without being ostentatious. The single large window offered a sweeping view of Frankfurt – looking north across the river, as if from Sachsenhausen, toward the three jet-black towers of the Siemens / Deutsche Bank Center – which Thomas believed was as honest as any conceivable alternative. Half the offices in Frankfurt itself looked out over recorded tropical rainforests, stunning desert gorges, Antarctic ice shelves – or wholly synthetic landscapes: rural-idyllic, futuristic, interplanetary, or simply surreal. With the freedom to choose whatever he liked, he’d selected this familiar sight from his corporeal days; sentimental, perhaps, but at least it wasn’t ludicrously inappropriate.
Thomas turned away from the window, and regarded his visitor with good-natured skepticism. He replied in English; the office software could have translated for him – and would have chosen the very same words and syntax, having been cloned from his own language centers – but Thomas still preferred to use the version “residing inside” his own “skull.”
“Two million? What’s the scheme? Let me guess. Under your skillful management, my capital will grow at the highest possible rate consistent with the need for total security. The price of computation is sure to fall again, sooner or later; the fact that it’s risen for the last fifteen years only makes that more likely than ever. So: it may take a decade or two – or three, or four – but eventually, the income from my modest investment will be enough to keep me running on the latest hardware, indefinitely … while also providing you with a small commission, of course.” Thomas laughed, without malice. “You don’t seem to have researched your prospective client very thoroughly. You people usually have immaculate intelligence – but I’m afraid you’ve really missed the target with me. I’m in no danger of being shut down. The hardware we’re using, right now, isn’t leased from anyone; it’s wholly owned by a foundation I set up before my death. My estate is being managed to my complete satisfaction. I have no problems – financial, legal, peace of mind – for you to solve. And the last thing in the world I need is a cheap and nasty perpetuity fund. Your offer is useless to me.”
Paul Durham chose to display no sign of disappointment. He said, “I’m not talking about a perpetuity fund. I’m not selling any kind of financial service. Will you give me a chance to explain?”
Thomas nodded affably. “Go ahead. I’m listening.” Durham had flatly refused to state his business in advance, but Thomas had decided to see him anyway – anticipating a perverse satisfaction in confirming that the man’s mysterious coyness hid nothing out of the ordinary. Thomas almost always agreed to meet visitors from outside – even though experience had shown that most were simply begging for money, one way or another. He believed that anyone willing to slow down their brain by a factor of seventeen, solely for the privilege of talking to him face-to-face, deserved a hearing – and he wasn’t immune to the intrinsic flattery of the process, the unequal sacrifice of time.
There was more to it, though, than flattery.
When other Copies called on him in his office, or sat beside him at a boardroom table, everyone was “present” in exactly the same sense. However bizarre the algorithmic underpinnings of the encounter, it was a meeting of equals. No boundaries were crossed.
A visitor, though, who could lift and empty a coffee cup, who could sign a document and shake your hand – but who was, indisputably, lying motionless on a couch in another (higher?) metaphysical plane – came charged with too many implicit reminders of the nature of things to be faced with the same equanimity. Thomas valued that. He didn’t want to grow complacent – or worse. Visitors helped him to retain a clear sense of what he’d become.
Durham said, “Of course I’m aware of your situation – you have one of the most secure arrangements I’ve seen. I’ve read the incorporation documents of the Soliton Foundation, and they’re close to watertight. Under present legislation.”
Thomas laughed heartily. “But you think you can do better? Soliton pays its most senior lawyers almost a million a year; you should have got yourself some forged qualifications and asked me to employ you. Under present legislation! When the laws change, believe me, they’ll change for the better. I expect you know that Soliton spends a small fortune lobbying for improvement – and it’s not alone. The trend is in one direction: there are more Copies every year, and most of them have de facto control over virtually all of the wealth they owned when they were alive. I’m afraid your timing’s atrocious if you’re planning on using scare tactics; I received a report last week predicting full human rights – in Europe, at least – by the early sixties. Ten years isn’t long for me to wait. I’ve grown used to the current slowdown factor; even if processor speeds improve, I could easily choose to keep living at the rate I’m living now, for another six or seven subjective months, rather than pushing all the things I’m looking forward to – like European citizenship – further into the future.”
Durham’s puppet inclined its head in a gesture of polite assent; Thomas had a sudden vision of a second puppet – one Durham truly felt himself to be inhabiting – hunched over a control panel, hitting a button on an etiquette sub-menu. Was that paranoid? But any sensible mendicant visitor would do just that, conducting the meeting at a distance rather than exposing their true body language to scrutiny.
The visible puppet said, “Why spend a fortune upgrading, for the sake of effectively slowing down progress? And I agree with you about the outlook for reform – in the short term. Of course people begrudge Copies their longevity, but the PR has been handled remarkably well. A few carefully chosen terminally ill children are scanned and resurrected every year: better than a trip to Disney World. There’s discreet sponsorship of a sitcom about working-class Copies, which makes the whole idea less threatening. The legal status of Copies is being framed as a human rights issue, especially in Europe: Copies are disabled people, no more, no less – really just a kind of radical amputee – and anyone who talks about decadent rich immortals getting their hands on all the wealth is shouted down as a neo-Nazi.
“So you might well achieve citizenship in a decade. And if you’re lucky, the situation could be stable for another twenty or thirty years after that. But … what’s twenty or thirty years to you? Do you honestly think that the status quo will be tolerated forever?”
Thomas said, “Of course not – but I’ll tell you what would be ‘tolerated’: scanning facilities, and computing power, so cheap that everyone on the planet could be resurrected. Everyone who wanted it. And when I say cheap, I mean at a cost comparable to a dose of vaccine at the turn of the century. Imagine that. Death could be eradicated – like smallpox or malaria. And I’m not talking about some solipsistic nightmare; by then, telepresence robots will let Copies interact with the physical world as fully as if they were human. Civilization wouldn’t have deserted reality – just transcended biology.”
“That’s a long, long way in the future.”
“Certainly. But don’t accuse me of thinking in the short term.”
“And in the meantime? The privileged class of Copies will grow larger, more powerful – and more threatening to the vast majority of people, who still won’t be able to join them. The costs will come down, but not drastically – just enough to
meet some of the explosion in demand from the executive class, once they throw off their qualms, en masse. Even in secular Europe, there’s a deeply ingrained prejudice that says dying is the responsible, the moral thing to do. There’s a Death Ethic – and the first substantial segment of the population abandoning it will trigger a huge backlash. A small enough elite of giga-rich Copies is accepted as a freak show; tycoons can get away with anything, they’re not expected to act like ordinary people. But just wait until the numbers go up by a factor of ten.”
Thomas had heard it all before. “We may be unpopular for a while. I can live with that. But you know, even now we’re vilified far less than people who strive for organic hyperlongevity – transplants, cellular rejuvenation, whatever – because at least we’re no longer pushing up the cost of health care, competing for the use of overburdened medical facilities. Nor are we consuming natural resources at anything like the rate we did when we were alive. If the technology improves sufficiently, the environmental impact of the wealthiest Copy could end up being less than that of the most ascetic living human. Who’ll have the high moral ground, then? We’ll be the most ecologically sound people on the planet.”
Durham smiled. The puppet. “Sure – and it could lead to some nice ironies if it ever came true. But even low environmental impact might not seem so saintly, when the same computing power could be used to save tens of thousands of lives through weather control.”
“Operation Butterfly has inconvenienced some of my fellow Copies very slightly. And myself not at all.”