“The network,” said Gina. “It adjusts things. A hermit type needs to live alone. A social butterfly gets plugged in with all the others. The network gives you what you need, even if it’s not what you want.”
What I needed. This was what I needed? Cleaning up after a bunch of smug little assholes, and they weren’t even real? Just bits and bytes and bots?
“I needed to be a billionaire,” I said. “I needed an island. A sword. An adventure. Something.”
“You think you do,” said Gina.
“I know I do,” I said.
“You like the ancient Greeks,” said Gina. “Ever read Aristotle? The Golden Mean?”
I’d heard about that one for sure, or at least the basics. It was some NPR segment, I could swear it. I racked my brain and then it clicked. “Moderation of pleasure. Moderation of everything, and that’s the key to living the best life you can live.”
“Models and bottles would have worn you out,” said Gina. “Especially with your personality. There’s an AI running in the background that monitors you. Your happiness. The whole thing’s based on the concept of the Golden Mean. The AI adjusts your life to your talents, your interests, your abilities, your personality. It gave you an easy job. One with time to think. Not too hard, but not something where you could just lay around and turn into an empty lump.” She waved my book in front of me. “It’s not exactly the coal mines, is it?”
I blushed, I think. I felt in it my cheeks.
“It’s like that with everything,” said Gina. “A little pleasure, a little pain. Pleasure to make you live, pain to make you grow. Your porridge isn’t too hot, it isn’t too cold. It’s just right. We’ve tried the other way. We’ve tried it all. This is what works. The only way that works.”
It made sense, as much as anything could when everything around me was turned to stone. But I started to wonder. Not about this world, but about the other one. “Why don’t I remember anything? From before I went in?”
“You were born in a test tube, and you’ve been in here ever since,” said Gina. “So was I. So was everyone. Grown in a vat, plugged in, and handed off to parents who wanted a child to raise. History ended a long time ago, at least out there. At least for humanity. In here we’re just on repeat. 1970 to 2100. It was the only period we could really manage without making everything up. Try rebuilding Ancient Greece. It’s impossible. Their fashion, their politics, their conversations, their music, their relationships: you’d have to make up more details than you can imagine. It’s easier to recreate an era of mass recording, mass media, mass data. Everything down to the last pixel was stored on some server somewhere. Somebody took a photo or shot a vid. Everybody’s movements, everybody’s chatter, everybody’s entire lives for about a hundred years. All tracked, all stored, all waiting around on dusty old computers and ready to be fed into the sim.”
“And what happens in 2100?” I said.
“In the real world?” said Gina. “Nothing. Nothing at all. We were all gone by then. We were all in here. History and culture and everything were over. How can you have history when everyone’s off in their own sim? How can you have a culture when nobody listens to the same things, watches the same things, or even lives in the same world? How can you have anything, any connection at all? The only thing we all have in common is the past. It’s our anchor. Our last touchstone to one another. We all live through it, and we all know it.”
“I meant what happens to me,” I said. “I just blink out? Everything just ends?”
“It’s a hundred and thirty years,” said Gina. “There’s billions of instances at any given time, all running through the period at different times with different people in them. They start, they end, and another one starts again for someone else. Just like human lives, and long enough to fit one in it. Nobody lives forever, even today. You’ve got a body out there. We all do. But that’s kind of the problem I’m here to talk to you about.”
My knees were knocking. I slumped back into my chair. This was too much. It felt like one of those horror movies, where you’re staring at something awful but you just keep wanting to look away. Nobody I knew was real. It was just me, alone, and it always had been.
And my dreams. I’d had so many dreams. Rock star. Famous scientist. Professor. I’d wanted it all, and I’d never even had a chance at it. That computer would have stopped me even if I’d tried. Kept me right in the middle, right in that Golden Mean. Right down on the ground with all the rest of them, even if I deserved better. I could be the smartest guy in the world, and it wouldn’t matter. The computer said I had to live an average life, and so I did.
“Jake,” said Gina, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Jake, there’s more.”
More. There couldn’t be more. I didn’t think I could take any more.
“I know it’s hard,” said Gina. “It’s a shock to the system. But we need your help. We’ve got a big, big problem on the outside. And I want you to help us fix it.”
“Outside,” I said. That scared me even more. What the hell was left out there? Nobody in here, nobody out there. All one big nothing.
“The sun,” said Gina. “It’s been a long time since humanity went in. And something’s gone wrong. The sun’s going supernova, Jake. And a hell of a lot sooner than we’d thought. We’ve got theories, but we don’t know exactly why. And we’ve got to figure out a way to stop it.”
“The sun,” I said.
“The real sun,” said Gina. “We’re building a lab and assembling the greatest minds alive. Scientists. Philosophers. Thinkers. Anyone who could help. You’ll love talking to them when you get a chance. Especially if you’re into physics.”
The greatest minds alive. Boy, did I love the sound of that. In here I was alone, and maybe I was meant to be. But then again, maybe I wasn’t. Maybe the computer didn’t know everything.
It adjusted things, she said. To fit what I needed, and not what I wanted. To make me live an average life. The life of a hermit, just how I liked it. Not too poor, not too rich. No fame to force me to talk to people I didn’t want to. No high-powered job where I had to deal with bosses and deadlines and all that other crap. Maybe the computer was right to force me into this life, even if I’d never have chosen it.
But maybe it was wrong. Maybe I needed to interact with other people. To reach out, to make that connection, even if sometimes it hurt. Maybe the computer just didn’t get how people are, what we are. Maybe it would have been worth it. Finally being recognized for the mind I had, the theories I came up with, the philosophies I pondered. Maybe I shouldn’t just accept what I was. Maybe I should be something better. Rise above the cattle. Fly free in the skies instead of being caged down on the ground.
“Will you come?” said Gina. She muttered something under her breath again, and a door opened up behind her. It was pure white, a rectangle floating in the air, leading off to God knew where. “Will you help us? Out in the lab? It’s not as nice as it is in here. But if we don’t figure out what’s going on, our worlds are going to end. All of them.”
I couldn’t say no. Not to her. Not when she was flashing those doe eyes at me, looking at me like I was the most important man in the world.
“Okay,” I said.
She smiled and took my hand. And we walked through the door together.
It was black on the other side, not white. Pure darkness. I was in some kind of coffin, floating in rank-smelling liquid goo. Like oil that’s been in the car too long, all hot and sticky and covering every inch of my skin. There were tubes leading into my mouth, and I felt wires implanted into my veins as I thrashed around in the goop. Then a lid opened up above me, and I saw the real world for the very first time.
She was standing there holding the lid. Gina. Still beautiful, but not quite as perfect as she’d been inside my little private world. Her hair a little dimmer, her nose a little bigger. But one thing was still perfection: those eyes, and the soul that shined out from behind them. And that smile. The same one that had gre
eted me in there was beaming down above me.
She lent me a hand and dragged me out. A tank. I’d been living inside some kind of tank, a solid shiny chrome except for a red bar code painted on the side. Gina handed me a towel: I was naked, and I tried my best to cover up even as I wiped away the slimy residue I’d been bobbing in for decades.
I looked around. Everything was tanks. More of those ten billion people just dreaming away, not even knowing there was a world out here to live in. It didn’t look like much. Dark and grimy, with nobody around to take care of it. No one lived here, not on the outside. There wasn’t anyone to care that it looked like an abandoned factory, tanks filled with people lining the walls in endless rows.
“This is it?” I said. I coughed up something black, covering the towel in goo. Oil, all in my throat, all in my lungs. I thought I was going to drown in it, but she just handed me a fresh towel.
“Biolyte,” said Gina. “It looks nasty, but it’s organic. Nutrients. Oxygen. Minerals. Everything you need while you sleep, it’s all in there.”
She handed me a jumpsuit: stylish, shiny, and black. I got dressed and we wound through the corridors until finally we came to an opening in the wall. The sun was blaring through. The real sun, but not like in my sim. This one was a fat red beast of a thing hogging up the sky. I could barely even look up without my eyes screaming at me in pain. Gina took me through the opening, out onto a platform. A launch pad. Half a dozen aircraft were perched on the blacktop, a single seat in each of them. She helped me into one, and after I got inside a transparent plastic bubble slid shut around me.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“You’ll be fine,” she said. Her voice was muffled by the plastic, but we could still hear each other.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“The lab,” said Gina. “The group we’re getting together. We’re the first humans in centuries to walk the Earth. And we’re all living at the lab.”
Engines roared beneath me. I felt myself rising, then floating. I could see Gina down below, boarding an aircraft of her own. But mine was already zipping through the air, without a pilot, without a crew. I craned my neck to see the building I’d been inside: a bronze obelisk stretching up to the sky further than I could see. How many vats were inside, just like mine? Millions? A billion? All around us was an endless desert, and the obelisk was the only sign that humans had ever ruled the place, the only sign we’d ever even existed.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Dunes rolled into dunes as we flew, dotted from time to time with patches of green. They were islands of life in an ocean of death. Shaped like perfect circles, and inside their boundaries were jungles or grassland or ponds. I could see things flitting above them: drones, drizzling out artificial rain from above, tending to their little gardens all by themselves. Something survived, at least, even if whatever was down there needed a metallic helping hand to do it. Just like all the rest of us, I guess.
We came to a green patch, bigger than the others, a lake at the center and a building on the shore. The lab. It had to be. My aircraft slowed, then descended, touching down on a strip of pavement beside the building. I slapped against the plastic: no dice. The thing wasn’t opening. There were buttons in there, but I wasn’t stupid enough to push them. Who the hell knew what they’d do?
I was lucky. Gina was just a few seconds behind. She let me out, and then we were there. The lab. The promised land, at least for me. I wondered what it’d be like, finally talking to people who were like me. Interesting people. Smart people. Real people. I wondered what they’d think about the Theory of Everything. It wasn’t done, and maybe it never would be. What the heck did I know about physics anymore? Just stuff I read about how things worked in a world some computer had cobbled together. The rules out here could be anything.
But I’d learn. This time, this life, I’d finally get my chance to do it right.
She led me through the door and into a scientist’s dream. It was a lab, all right. Beakers and burners and robots and telescopes. Analyzers and scanners and radioscopes and satellite monitors. An entire wall full of books. An entire wall! They didn’t need them, I bet. But they liked them. I always liked the smell. The touch. My kind of people always did.
There was no one there, just us.
“Like it?” said Gina.
“I love it,” I said. There were work spaces, and I sat down in a chair in front of one. There was a machine there, a microscope. It didn’t look like one, but I could tell: it was projecting a holographic image of some kind of amoeba squirting around in a primordial glop, gobbling up tiny critters without a care in the world.
“Can I?” I said.
“Go ahead,” said Gina with a smile.
I fiddled with the dials. Pushed buttons. Played. It was a toy to me, a portal to another place. Worlds within worlds: little ones, big ones, real ones, fake ones. I wanted to see them all, think about them all, be the guy who discovered something nobody ever had because nobody’d ever bothered to look.
I was chasing a squiggly green thing with the microscope when I heard the voices. People approaching. Real ones. The people I’d spend the rest of my life with. The people I’d help to save the world. Professors. Scientists. Philosophers. No more cattle, and no more suffering fools. Not for me. I was with my own kind, finally, for the first time in my entire life.
There were three of them. Two young guys, a short Indian with a pocket protector bigger than his head and a chubby black kid who wouldn’t look up from the tablet he was working on. And then the third. Older, his hair all grey, his glasses straddling his nose as he strode towards Gina with an air of authority.
“Professor Offredi,” said the man. “The Lansing equation. We need a status update. We’ve got the hadron colliders running day in, day out, and we’re not making the slightest bit of progress.”
“I’ve been busy,” said Gina. “Staffing the place up. Jake, meet Dr. Fassbender.” I stood, holding out my hand, a doofy smile on my face. Gina bubbled with praise. “Dr. Fassbender is the man in charge, the greatest physicist alive—”
“The equation,” said Dr. Fassbender. He didn’t even look at me. “That’s what counts. We need to pull some more people out. AI experts, if anyone’s in there studying that. We need a new algorithm to analyze the data output—"
“I’ve got some thoughts about this thing,” I said.
Dr. Fassbender glowered at me, his glasses dropping down a full inch on his nose. He didn’t like being interrupted, not one bit. The Indian kid’s eyes bulged. The fat kid finally looked up from his tablet, staring at me like I was some kind of bug he was about to stick with a pin.
“This nova thing,” I said.
“Supernova,” said the fat kid.
“Yeah,” I said. “So I have this theory I’ve been working on, pretty much my entire life. The Theory of Everything. It’s like Eastern philosophy mixed with Western. Like quantum physics and Reiki healing, they have these commonalities. There’s dots, and I think I’m about to connect them. And it has to do with energy. And the sun, it uses all this energy, just like in feng shui—"
“What the fuck is he talking about?” said Dr. Fassbender.
“He’s the guy you asked for,” said Gina. “He’s just a little excited. He likes physics. And he hasn’t talked to a lot of people. Not real ones.”
“Oh, that one,” said Dr. Fassbender. He didn’t even look at me. “Get him going, and then get back in the sims and find me my AI team.” He started to walk away, his two flunkies tagging along a few steps behind him.
Assholes. They were intellectuals, and they were my kind of people, but they were total assholes. It figured. But hey, at least they could think. At least they weren’t cows like those dumb kids back at Harvard. I tried to recover, tried to get back into the swing of things. “I want to help,” I called after them. “With this nova thing. My theory—”
“Is he serious?” said Dr. Fassbender, his voice sharp
with irritation. He whirled around, stabbing a finger at Gina. “Did you tell him? About the Golden Mean?”
“I did,” said Gina. She bit her lip, hesitating. “Most of it.”
Dr. Fassbender sighed. “Follow me.” He walked me over to a little door tucked in the side of the room. We stood in front of it, and then he started to talk.
“The computer adjusted things for you inside the sim,” said Dr. Fassbender. “To keep you happy. To give you a life you’d truly enjoy.”
“Gina told me that,” I said. “Not too hot, not too cold.”
“Well,” said Dr. Fassbender. “One of the things the computer does is make people dumber.”
“Dumber,” I said. “You made me dumber inside the sim.”
I didn’t get it. Why the hell would the computer want to make me dumber? Dumb people were happier, I guess. It always seemed that way. But I was outside now, this was the real me—
“No, no, no,” said Dr. Fassbender. The guy was pissed off that he even had to talk to me, and me guessing wrong made it ten times worse. He was going to be a hard guy to learn from, and a harder guy to work for. His little cronies were scared of him, and that spoke volumes. But I was here to learn, and if he was going to lecture, I was going to listen. “You’re not the one it made dumber. It was everyone else. Didn’t you ever notice that everyone around you was insanely stupid?”
“All of them,” I said. “They didn’t know anything. They didn’t even read—"
“The computer dumbs down the bots in pretty much every sim,” said Dr. Fassbender. “And I mean really, really dumb.”
He was right.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. I’d always wondered how the people around me could even have survived, let alone not get weeded out by natural selection. This challenged all my assumptions. Maybe we weren’t just a bunch of dumb apes stuffing ourselves with sugar and mindless television. Maybe we were something better. Something higher, and something more evolved than I’d ever thought we were. And I was finally going to be a part of it.
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