by Greg Egan
Such as?
For a start, I can’t afford it—
No? Who can’t afford it?
I whisper, “I know exactly how much this cost, you bastard. And I honestly don’t give a shit. I’m not going through with it.”
There’s no reply. I clench my teeth, uncover my eyes, look around the room. Away from the few dazzling patches of direct sunshine, everything glows softly in the diffuse light: the matte-white brick walls, the imitation (imitation) mahogany desk; even the Dali and Giger posters look harmless, domesticated. The simulation is perfect—or rather, finer-grained than my “visual” acuity, and hence indistinguishable from reality—as no doubt it was the other four times. Certainly, none of the other Copies complained about a lack of verisimilitude in their environments. In fact, they never said anything very coherent; they just ranted abuse, whined about their plight, and then terminated themselves—all within fifteen (subjective) minutes of gaining consciousness.
And me? What ever made me—him—think that I won’t do the same? How am I different from Copy number four? Three years older. More stubborn? More determined? More desperate for success? I was, for sure … back when I was still thinking of myself as the one who’d stay real, the one who’d sit outside and watch the whole experiment from a safe distance.
Suddenly I wonder: What makes me so sure that I’m not outside? I laugh weakly. I don’t remember anything after the scan, which is a bad sign, but I was overwrought, and I’d spent so long psyching myself up for “this” …
Get it over with.
I mutter the password, “Bremsstrahlung”—and my last faint hope vanishes, as a black-on-white square about a meter wide, covered in icons, appears in midair in front of me.
I give the interface window an angry thump; it resists me as if it were solid, and firmly anchored. As if I were solid, too. I don’t really need any more convincing, but I grip the top edge and lift myself right off the floor. I regret this; the realistic cluster of effects of exertion—down to the plausible twinge in my right elbow—pin me to this “body,” anchor me to this “place,” in exactly the way I should be doing everything I can to avoid.
Okay. Swallow it: I’m a Copy. My memories may be those of a human being, but I will never inhabit a real body “again.” Never inhabit the real world again … unless my cheapskate original scrapes up the money for a telepresence robot—in which case I could blunder around like the slowest, clumsiest, most neurologically impaired cripple. My model-of-a-brain runs seventeen times slower than the real thing. Yeah, sure, technology will catch up one day—and seventeen times faster for me than for him. In the meantime? I rot in this prison, jumping through hoops, carrying out his precious research—while he lives in my apartment, spends my money, sleeps with Elizabeth …
I close my eyes, dizzy and confused; I lean against the cool surface of the interface.
“His” research? I’m just as curious as him, aren’t I? I wanted this; I did this to myself. Nobody forced me. I knew exactly what the drawbacks would be, but I thought I’d have the strength of will (this time, at last) to transcend them, to devote myself, monklike, to the purpose for which I’d been brought into being—content in the knowledge that my other self was as unconstrained as ever.
Past tense. Yes, I made the decision—but I never really faced up to the consequences. Arrogant, self-deluding shit. It was only the knowledge that “I” would continue, free, on the outside, that gave me the “courage” to go ahead—but that’s no longer true, for me.
Ninety-eight percent of Copies made are of the very old, and the terminally ill. People for whom it’s the last resort—most of whom have spent millions beforehand, exhausting all the traditional medical options. And despite the fact that they have no other choice, 15 percent decide upon awakening—usually in a matter of hours—that they just can’t hack it.
And of those who are young and healthy, those who are merely curious, those who know they have a perfectly viable, living, breathing body outside?
The bail-out rate has been, so far, one hundred percent.
I stand in the middle of the room, swearing softly for several minutes, trying to prepare myself—although I know that the longer I leave it, the harder it will become. I stare at the floating interface; its dreamlike, hallucinatory quality helps, slightly. I rarely remember my dreams, and I won’t remember this one—but there’s no tragedy in that, is there?
I don’t want to be here.
I don’t want to be this.
And to think I used to find it so often disappointing, waking up yet again as the real Paul Durham: self-centered dilettante, spoiled by a medium-sized inheritance, too wealthy to gain any sense of purpose from the ordinary human struggle to survive—but insufficiently brain-dead to devote his life to the accumulation of ever more money and power. No status-symbol luxuries for Durham: no yachts, no mansions, no bioenhancements. He indulged other urges; threw his money in another direction entirely.
And I don’t know, anymore, what he thinks it’s done for him—but I know what it’s done to me.
I suddenly realize that I’m still stark naked. Habit—if no conceivable propriety—suggests that I should put on some clothes, but I resist the urge. One or two perfectly innocent, perfectly ordinary actions like that, and I’ll find I’m taking myself seriously, thinking of myself as real.
I pace the bedroom, grasp the cool metal of the doorknob a couple of times, but manage to keep myself from turning it. There’s no point even starting to explore this world.
I can’t resist peeking out the window, though. The view of the city is flawless—every building, every cyclist, every tree, is utterly convincing—and so it should be: it’s a recording, not a simulation. Essentially photographic—give or take a little computerized touching up and filling in—and totally predetermined. What’s more, only a tiny part of it is “physically” accessible to me; I can see the harbor in the distance, but if I tried to go for a stroll down to the water’s edge …
Enough. Just get it over with.
I prod a menu icon labeled UTILITIES; it spawns another window in front of the first. The function I’m seeking is buried several menus deep—but for all that I thought I’d convinced myself that I wouldn’t want to use it, I brushed up on the details just a week ago, and I know exactly where to look. For all my self-deception, for all that I tried to relate only to the one who’d stay outside, deep down, I must have understood full well that I had two separate futures to worry about.
I finally reach the EMERGENCIES menu, which includes a cheerful icon of a cartoon figure suspended from a parachute. Bailing out is what they call it—but I don’t find that too cloyingly euphemistic; after all, I can’t commit “suicide” when I’m not legally human. In fact, the law requires that a bail-out option be available, without reference to anything so troublesome as the “rights” of the Copy; this stipulation arises solely from the ratification of certain purely technical, international software standards.
I prod the icon; it comes to life, and recites a warning spiel- I scarcely pay attention. Then it says, “Are you absolutely sure that you wish to shut down this Copy of Paul Durham?”
Nothing to it. Program A asks Program B to confirm its request for orderly termination. Packets of data are exchanged.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
A metal box, painted red, appears at my feet. I open it, take out the parachute, strap it on.
Then I close my eyes and say, “Listen, you selfish, conceited, arrogant turd: How many times do you need to be told? I’ll skip the personal angst; you’ve heard it all before—and ignored it all before. But when are you going to stop wasting your time, your money, your energy … when are you going to stop wasting your life…on something which you just don’t have the strength to carry through? After all the evidence to the contrary, do you honestly still believe that you’re brave enough, or crazy enough, to be your own guinea pig? Well, I’ve got news for you: You’re not.”
With my eyes s
till closed, I grip the release lever.
I’m nothing: a dream, a soon-to-be-forgotten dream.
My fingernails need cutting; they dig painfully into the skin of my palm.
Have I never, in a dream, feared the extinction of waking? Maybe I have—but a dream is not a life. If the only way I can reclaim my body, reclaim my world, is to wake and forget—
I pull the lever.
After a few seconds, I emit a constricted sob—a sound more of confusion than any kind of emotion—and open my eyes.
The lever has come away in my hand.
I stare dumbly at this metaphor for … what? A bug in the termination software? Some kind of hardware glitch?
Feeling—at last—truly dreamlike, I unstrap the parachute, and unfasten the neatly packaged bundle.
Inside, there is no illusion of silk, or Kevlar, or whatever else there might plausibly have been. Just a sheet of paper. A note.
Dear Paul,
The night after the scan was completed, I looked back over the whole preparatory stage of the project, and did a great deal of soul searching. And I came to the conclusion that—right up to the very last moment—my attitude was poisoned with ambivalence.
With hindsight, I very quickly came to realize just how foolish my qualms were—but that was too late for you. I couldn’t afford to ditch you, and have myself scanned yet again. So, what could I do?
This: I put your awakening on hold for a while, and tracked down someone who could make a few alterations to the virtual environment utilities. I know, that wasn’t strictly legal … but you know how important it is to me that you—that we—succeed this time.
I trust you’ll understand, and I’m confident that you’ll accept the situation with dignity and equanimity.
Best wishes,
Paul
I sink to my knees, still holding the note, staring at it in disbelief. He can’t have done this. He can’t have been so callous.
No? who am I kidding? Too weak to be so cruel to anyone else—perhaps. Too weak to go through with this in person—certainly. But as for making a copy, and then—once its future was no longer his future, no longer anything for him to fear—taking away its power to escape …
It rings so true that I hang my head in shame.
Then I drop the note, raise my head, and bellow with all the strength in my non-existent lungs:
“DURHAM! YOU PRICK!”
I think about smashing furniture. Instead, I take a long, hot shower. In part, to calm myself; in part, as an act of petty vengeance: I may not be adding to the cheapskate’s water bill, but he can damn well pay for twenty virtual minutes of gratuitous hydrodynamic calculations. I scrutinize the droplets and rivulets of water on my skin, searching for some small but visible anomaly at the boundary between my body—computed down to subcellular resolution—and the rest of the simulation, which is modeled much more crudely. If there are any discrepancies, though, they’re too subtle for me to detect.
I dress—I’m just not comfortable naked—and eat a late breakfast. The muesli tastes exactly like muesli, the toast exactly like toast, but I know there’s a certain amount of cheating going on with both taste and aroma. The detailed effects of chewing, and the actions of saliva, are being faked from empirical rules, not generated from first principles; there are no individual molecules being dissolved from the food and torn apart by enzymes—just a rough set of evolving nutrient concentration values, associated with each microscopic “parcel” of saliva. Eventually, these will lead to plausible increases in the concentrations of amino acids, various carbohydrates, and other substances all the way down to humble sodium and chloride ions, in similar “parcels” of gastric juices … which in turn will act as input data to the models of my intestinal villus cells. From there, into the bloodstream.
The coffee makes me feel alert, but also slightly detached—as always. Neurons, of course, are modeled with the greatest care of all, and whatever receptors to caffeine and its metabolites were present on each individual neuron in my original’s brain at the time of the scan, my model-of-a-brain should incorporate every one of them—in a simplified, but functionally equivalent, form.
I close my eyes and try to imagine the physical reality behind all this: a cubic meter of silent, motionless optical crystal, configured as a cluster of over a billion individual processors, one of a few hundred identical units in a basement vault… somewhere on the planet. I don’t even know what city I’m in; the scan was made in Sydney, but the model’s implementation would have been contracted out by the local node to the lowest bidder at the time.
I take a sharp vegetable knife from the kitchen drawer, and drive the point a short way into my forearm. I flick a few drops of blood onto the table—and wonder exactly which software is now responsible for the stuff. Will the blood cells “die off’ slowly—or have they already been surrendered to the extrasomatic general-physics model, far too unsophisticated to represent them, let alone keep them “alive”?
If I tried to slit my wrists, when exactly would he intervene? I gaze at my distorted reflection in the blade. Maybe he’d let me die, and then run the whole model again from scratch, simply leaving out the knife. After all, I reran all the earlier Copies hundreds of times, tampering with various aspects of their surroundings, trying in vain to find some cheap trick that would keep them from wanting to bail out. It must be a measure of sheer stubbornness that it took me—him—so long to admit defeat and rewrite the rules. I put down the knife. I don’t want to perform that experiment. Not yet.
I go exploring, although I don’t know what I’m hoping to find. Outside my own apartment, everything is slightly less than convincing; the architecture of the building is reproduced faithfully enough, down to the ugly plastic pot-plants, but every corridor is deserted, and every door to every other apartment is sealed shut—concealing, literally, nothing. I kick one door, as hard as I can; the wood seems to give slightly, but when I examine the surface, the paint isn’t even marked. The model will admit to no damage here, and the laws of physics can screw themselves.
There are people and cyclists on the street—all purely recorded. They’re solid rather than ghostly, but it’s an eerie kind of solidity; unstoppable, unswayable, they’re like infinitely strong, infinitely disinterested robots. I hitch a ride on one frail old woman’s back for a while; she carries me down the street, heedlessly. Her clothes, her skin, even her hair, all feel the same to me: hard as steel. Not cold, though. Neutral.
This street isn’t meant to serve as anything but three-dimensional wallpaper; when Copies interact with each other, they often use cheap, recorded environments full of purely decorative crowds. Plazas, parks, open-air cafés; all very reassuring, no doubt, when you’re fighting off a sense of isolation and claustrophobia. There are only about three thousand Copies in existence—a small population, split into even smaller, mutually antagonistic, cliques—and they can only receive realistic external visitors if they have friends or relatives willing to slow down their mental processes by a factor of seventeen. Most dutiful next-of-kin, I gather, prefer to exchange video recordings. Who wants to spend an afternoon with great-grandfather, when it burns up half a week of your life? Durham, of course, has removed all of my communications facilities; he can’t have me blowing the whistle on him and ruining everything.
When I reach the corner of the block, the visual illusion of the city continues, far into the distance, but when I try to step forward onto the road, the concrete pavement under my feet starts acting like a treadmill, sliding backward at precisely the rate needed to keep me motionless, whatever pace I adopt. I back off and try leaping over this region, but my horizontal velocity dissipates—without the slightest pretense of any “physical” justification—and I land squarely in the middle of the treadmill.
The people of the recording, of course, cross the border with ease. One man walks straight at me; I stand my ground, and find myself pushed into a zone of increasing viscosity, the air around me becoming pai
nfully unyielding before I slip free to one side. The software impeding me is, clearly, a set of clumsy patches which aims to cover every contingency—but which might not in fact be complete. The sense that discovering a way to breach this barrier would somehow “liberate” me is compelling—but completely irrational. Even if I did find a flaw in the program which enabled me to break through, I doubt I’d gain anything but decreasingly realistic surroundings. The recording can only contain complete information for points of view within a certain, finite zone; all there is to “escape to” is a range of coordinates where my view of the city would be full of distortions and omissions, and would eventually fade to black.
I step back from the corner, half dispirited, half amused. What did I expect to find? A big door at the edge of the model, marked EXIT, through which I could walk out into reality? Stairs leading metaphorically down to some boiler room representation of the underpinnings of this world, where I could throw a few switches and blow it all apart? Hardly. I have no right to be dissatisfied with my surroundings; they’re precisely what I ordered.
It’s early afternoon on a perfect spring day; I close my eyes and lift my face to the sun. Whatever I believe intellectually, there’s no denying that I’m beginning to feel a purely physical sense of integrity, of identity. My skin soaks up the warmth of the sunlight. I stretch the muscles in my arms, my shoulders, my back; the sensation is perfectly ordinary, perfectly familiar—and yet I feel that I’m reaching out from the self “in my skull” to the rest of me, binding it all together, staking some kind of claim. I feel the stirrings of an erection. Existence is beginning to seduce me. This body doesn’t want to evaporate. This body doesn’t want to bail out. It doesn’t much care that there’s another—“more real”—version of itself elsewhere. It wants to retain its wholeness. It wants to endure.