by Greg Egan
“Except how they respond to us.”
“Us? Nobody responds to us.”
Kate gave him a poisonous look. “How they respond to the Elysians.”
Peer thought it over. “I expect someone knows all about that, too. Someone must have modeled the reaction of Lambertian ‘society’ to finding out that they’re nothing but an experiment in Artificial Life.”
An Elysian presenting as a tall, thin young man took the stage. Durham introduced him as Dominic Repetto. Peer had given up trying to keep track of the proliferating dynasties long ago, but he thought the name was a recent addition; he certainly couldn’t recall a Repetto being involved in Autoverse studies when he’d had a passion for the subject himself.
Repetto addressed the meeting. “It’s my belief that the Lambertians now possess the conceptual framework they need to comprehend our existence, and to make sense of our role in their cosmology. It’s true that they lack artificial computers – but their whole language of ideas is based on representations of the world around them in the form of numerical models. These models were originally variations on a few genetically hardwired themes – maps of terrain showing food sources, algorithms for predicting predator behavior – but the modern Lambertians have evolved the skill of generating and testing whole new classes of models, in a way that’s as innate to them as language skills were to the earliest humans. A team of Lambertians can ‘speak’ and ‘judge’ a mathematical description of population dynamics in the mites they herd for food, as easily as pre-launch humans could construct or comprehend a simple sentence.
“We mustn’t judge them by anthropomorphic standards; human technological landmarks simply aren’t relevant. The Lambertians have deduced most of Autoverse chemistry and physics by observations of their natural world, supplemented by a very small number of controlled experiments. They’ve generated concepts equivalent to temperature and pressure, energy and entropy – without fire, metallurgy, or the wheel … let alone the steam engine. They’ve calculated the melting and boiling points of most of the elements – without ever purifying them. Their lack of technology only makes their intellectual achievements all the more astounding. It’s as if the ancient Greeks had written about the boiling point of nitrogen, or the Egyptians had predicted the chemical properties of chlorine.”
Peer smiled to himself cynically; the founders always loved to hear Earth rate a mention – and all the better if the references were to times long before they were born.
Repetto paused; he grew perceptibly taller, and his youthful features became subtly more dignified, more mature. Most Elysians would see this as no more manipulative than a change in posture, or tone of voice. He said solemnly, “Most of you will be aware of the resolution of the Town Meeting of January 5th, 3052, forbidding contact with the Lambertians until they’d constructed their own computers and performed simulations – experiments in Artificial Life – as sophisticated as the Autoverse itself. That was judged to be the safest possible benchmark … but I believe it has turned out to be misconceived, and completely inappropriate.
“The Lambertians are looking for answers to questions about their origins. We know there are no answers to be discovered inside the Autoverse itself – but I believe the Lambertians are intellectually equipped to comprehend the larger truth. We have a responsibility to make that truth known to them. I propose that this meeting overturns the resolution of 3052, and authorizes a team of Autoverse scholars to enter Planet Lambert and – in a culturally sensitive manner – inform the Lambertians of their history and context.”
The buzz of discussion grew louder. Peer felt a vestigial twinge of interest, in spite of himself. In a universe without death or scarcity, politics took strange forms. Any one of the founders who disagreed with the way Planet Lambert was managed would be perfectly free to copy the whole Autoverse into their own territory, and to do as they wished with their own private version. In inverse proportion to the ease of such a move, any faction would have a rare chance here to demonstrate their “influence” and increase their “prestige” by persuading the meeting to retain the ban on contact with the Lambertians – without provoking their opponents into cloning the Autoverse and pushing ahead regardless. Many of the first generation still chose to value these things, for their own sake.
Elaine Sanderson rose to her feet, resplendent in a light blue suit and a body which together proclaimed: 1972 to 2045 AD, and proud of it (even if she only wore them on official occasions). Peer let himself time-trip for a second: in his late teens, David Hawthorne had seen the flesh-and-blood Sanderson on television, being sworn-in as Attorney General of the United States of America – a nation whose constituent particles at the time of that oath might well overlap with some portion of Elysium at this very instant.
Sanderson said, “Thank you, Mr. Repetto, for giving us your perspective on this important matter. It’s unfortunate that so few of us take the time to keep ourselves up-to-date with the progress of the Lambertians. Although they have come all the way from single-celled lifeforms to their present, highly sophisticated state without our explicit intervention, ultimately they are in our care at every moment, and we all have a duty to treat that responsibility with the utmost seriousness.
“I can still recall some of the earliest plans we made for dealing with the Autoverse: to hide the details of life on Planet Lambert from ourselves, deliberately; to watch and wait, as if from afar, until the inhabitants sent probes to their system’s other worlds; to arrive as ‘explorers’ in ‘space ships’, struggling to learn the language and customs of these ‘aliens’ – perhaps going so far as to extend the Autoverse to include an invisibly distant star, with a ‘home world’ from which we might travel. Slavish imitations of the hypothetical interstellar missions we’d left behind. Bizarre charades.
“Mercifully, we abandoned those childish ideas long ago. There will be no sham ‘mission of discovery’ – and no lying to the Lambertians, or to ourselves.
“There is one quality of those early, laughable schemes which should still be kept in mind, though: we always intended to meet the Lambertians as equals. Visitors from a distant world who would stretch their vision of the universe – but not subvert it, not swallow it whole. We would approach them as siblings, arguing our viewpoint – not Gods, revealing divine truth.
“I ask the meeting to consider whether these two equally laudable aims, of honesty and humility, could not be reconciled. If the Lambertians are on the verge of a crisis in understanding their origins, what patronizing instinct compels us to rush in and provide them with an instant solution? Mr. Repetto tells us how they have already inferred the properties of the chemical elements – elements which remain mysterious and invisible, manifesting themselves only in the elaborate phenomena of the natural world. Clearly, the Lambertians have a gift for uncovering hidden patterns, hidden explanations. How many more centuries can it be, then, before they guess the truth about their own cosmology?
“I propose that we delay contact until the hypothesis of our existence has arisen naturally amongst the Lambertians, and has been thoroughly explored. Until they have decided for themselves exactly what we might mean to them. Until they have debated, as we are debating right now, how best they might deal with us.
“If aliens had visited Earth the moment humans first looked up at the sky and suffered some crisis of understanding, they would have been hailed as Gods. If they’d arrived in the early twenty-first century – when humans had been predicting their existence and pondering the logistics of contact, for decades – they would have been accepted as equals; more experienced, more skilled, more knowledgeable, but ultimately nothing but an expected part of a well-behaved, well-understood universe.
“I believe that we should wait for the equivalent moment in Lambertian history: when the Lambertians are impatient for proof of our existence – when our continued absence becomes far harder for them to explain than our arrival would be. Once they begin to suspect that we’re eavesdropping on
every conversation they hold about us, it would be dishonest to remain concealed. Until then, we owe them the opportunity to find as many answers as they can, without us.”
Sanderson resumed her seat. Portions of the audience applauded demurely. Peer lazily mapped the response and correlated it with appearance; she seemed to have been a big hit with the third generation mainstream – but they had a reputation for gleefully faking everything.
Kate said, “Don’t you wish you could join the discussion?” Half sarcasm, half self-pity.
Peer said cheerfully, “No – but if you have strong views on the matter yourself, I suggest you copy the whole Autoverse, and make contact with the Lambertians personally – or leave them in unspoiled ignorance. Whichever you prefer.”
“You know I don’t have room to do that.”
“And you know that makes no difference. There’s a copy of the original biosphere seed, the entire compressed description, in the central library. You could copy that, and freeze yourself until you finally have the room to unfold it. The whole thing’s deterministic – every Lambertian would flutter its little wings for you in exactly the same way as it did for the Elysians. Right up to the moment of contact.”
“And you honestly believe that the City will grow that large? That after a billion years of Standard Time, they won’t have trashed it and built something new?”
“I don’t know. But there’s always the alternative: you could launch a whole new TVC universe, and make all the room you need. I’ll come along, if you want me to.” He meant it; he’d follow her anywhere. She only had to say the word.
But she looked away. He ached to grant her happiness, but the choice was hers: if she wanted to believe that she was standing outside in the snow – or rather, bricked into the walls – watching the Elysians feast on Reality, there was nothing he could do to change that.
Three hundred and seven speakers followed; one hundred and sixty-two backed Repetto, one hundred and forty supported Sanderson. Five waffled on with no apparent agenda; a remarkably low proportion. Peer daydreamed about the sound of sandpaper on wood.
When the vote finally came – one per original attendee, no last-minute clonings accepted – Sanderson won by a ten per cent margin. She took the stage and made a short speech thanking the voters for their decision. Peer suspected that many of the Elysians had quietly slipped out of their bodies and gone elsewhere, by now.
Dominic Repetto said a few words too, clearly disappointed, but gracious in defeat. It was Paul Durham – presumably his mentor and sponsor – who showed the slightly vacuous expression of a model-of-a-body with its facial muscles crudely decoupled from its model-of-a-brain. Durham – with his strange history of brief episodes as a Copy in different permutations – seemed to have never really caught up with the pre-launch state-of-the-art, let alone the Elysian cutting edge; when he had something to hide, it was obvious. He was taking the decision badly.
Kate said coldly, “That’s it. You’ve fulfilled your civic duty. You can go now.”
Peer made his eyes big and brown. “Come back to the workshop with me. We can make love in the wood dust. Or just sit around and talk. Be happy, for no reason. It wouldn’t be so bad.”
Kate shook her head and faded away. Peer felt a pang of disappointment, but not for long.
There’d be other times.
Chapter 25
Thomas crouched in the bathroom window frame, half-way out of Anna’s flat. He knew that the edges of the brickwork would be sharper than razors, this time. He made his way across to the neighbor’s window, repeating the familiar movements precisely, though his hands and forearms wept blood. Insects crawled from the wounds and swarmed along his arms, over his face, into his mouth. He gagged and retched, but he didn’t falter.
Down the drainpipe. From the alley below, he returned to the flat. Anna was by his side on the stairs. They danced again. Argued again. Struggled again.
“Think fast. Think fast.”
He knelt over her, one knee to either side, took her face in his hands, then closed his eyes. He brought her head forward, then slammed it back against the wall. Five times. Then he held his fingers near her nostrils, without opening his eyes. He felt no exhalation.
Thomas was in his Frankfurt apartment, a month after the murder, dreaming. Anna stood by the bed. He reached out from beneath the blankets into the darkness, eyes closed. She took his hand in hers. With her other hand, she stroked the scar on his forearm tenderly, then she pushed one finger easily through his brittle skin and liquefying flesh. He thrashed against the sheets, but she wouldn’t let go; she dug with her fingers until she was gripping naked bone. When she snapped the ulna and radius, he convulsed with pain and ejaculated suddenly, everything his corrupt body contained departing in a single stream: dark clotted blood, maggots, pus, excrement.
Thomas was in his suburban mansion, sitting naked on the floor at the end of a hallway, startled. He shifted his right hand, and realized that he was clutching a small vegetable knife. And he remembered why.
There were seven faint pink scars on his abdomen, seven digits, still legible, right-way-up as he gazed down at them: 1053901. He set to work recarving the first six.
He didn’t trust the clocks. The clocks lied. And although every incision he made in his skin healed perfectly, given time, for a long time it seemed he had managed to repair the numbers before they faded. He didn’t know what they measured, except their own steady ascent, but they seemed like a touchstone of something approaching sanity.
He re-cut the final digit as a two, then licked his fingers and wiped the blood away. At first it seeped back, but after five or six repetitions, the fresh wound stood clean and red against his pale skin. He pronounced the number several times. “One million, fifty-three thousand, nine hundred and two.”
Thomas climbed to his feet and walked down the hall. His body knew only the time he carved upon it; he never felt tired, or hungry, or even unclean – he could sleep or not sleep, eat or not eat, wash or not wash; it made no perceptible difference. His hair and fingernails never grew. His face never aged.
He stopped outside the library. He believed he’d methodically torn all the books to shreds several times, but on each occasion the debris had been cleared away and the books replaced, in his absence.
He walked into the room. He glanced at the terminal in the corner, the object of his deepest loathing; he’d never been able to damage it – smash, chip, bend, or even scratch any part of its visible form. Indestructible or not, it had never functioned.
He wandered from shelf to shelf, but he’d read every book a dozen or more times. They’d all become meaningless. The library was well-stocked, and he’d studied the sacred texts of every faith; those few which, by some stretch of poetic license, might have been said to describe his condition offered no prospect for changing it. In the distant past, he’d undergone a hundred feverish conversions; he’d ranted to every deity which humanity had ever postulated. If he’d stumbled on the one which existed – the one responsible for his damnation – his pleas had been to no avail.
The one thing he’d never expected after death was uncertainty. It had worried him deeply, at first: being cast into Hell, without so much as a glimpse of Heaven to taunt him, and a smug I-told-you-so from the faithful on their way up – let alone a formal trial before the God of his childhood, in which every doctrinal assertion he’d ever doubted was proclaimed as Absolute Truth, and every theological debate was resolved, once and for all.
But he’d since decided that if his condition was eternal and irreversible, it hardly mattered what the God who’d made it so was named.
Thomas sat cross-legged on the floor of the library, and tried to empty his mind.
“Think fast. Think fast.”
Anna lay before him, bleeding and unconscious. Time slowed down. The moment he was approaching seemed impossible to face, impossible to traverse yet again – but he inched toward it, and he knew that he had no power to turn away.
/> He’d come to understand that all the visions of his own decay and mutilation were nothing but elaborate gestures of self-loathing. When his flesh was torn from his body it was a distraction – almost a relief. His suffering did not illuminate his crime; it drowned his thoughts in an anesthetic haze. It was a fantasy of power, a fantasy of retribution.
But here there was no balm of self-righteous pain, no pretense that his baroque tortures were working some alchemy of justice. He knelt over Anna, and could not weep, could not flinch, could not blind himself to the measure of what he’d done.
He might have called an ambulance. He might have saved her life. It would have taken so little strength, so little courage, so little love, that he could not imagine how a human being could have failed to possess enough of each, and still walk the Earth.
But he had. He had.
So he brought her head forward, and slammed it against the wall.
Chapter 26
After a week as Durham’s guest, Maria went looking for a place of her own.
Her anger had faded, the numbness of shock had faded, the fifth or sixth wave of disbelief had finally lifted. But she still felt almost paralyzed by the strangeness of the truths she’d been forced to accept: her exile from the universe of flesh-and-blood humanity; the impossible existence of Elysium; intelligent life in the Autoverse. She couldn’t begin to make sense of any of these things until she had a fixed point to stand on.
She had refused to pack any luggage to accompany her scan file into the next life; it would have felt like she was humoring Durham if she’d made the slightest concession to the needs of a Copy who she’d believed would never run. No environments, no furniture, no clothes; no photographs, no diaries, no scanned memorabilia. No VR duplicate of her old narrow terrace to make her feel at home. She might have set about reconstructing it from memory, detail by detail – or let architectural software pluck a perfect imitation straight out of her brain – but she didn’t feel strong enough to deal with the emotional contradictions: the tug of the old world, the taint of self-deception. Instead, she decided to choose one of the pre-defined apartments in the City itself.