Artifacts

by Greg Egan

  I listen to music until well after midnight. Tsang Chao, Michael Nyman, Philip Glass. It makes no difference that each note “really” lasts seventeen times as long as it should, or that the audio ROM sitting in the player “really” possesses no microstructure, or that the “sound” itself is being fed into my model-of-a-brain by a computerized sleight-of-hand that bears no resemblance to the ordinary process of hearing. The climax of Glass’s Mishima still seizes me like a grappling hook through the heart-

  If the computations behind all this were performed over millennia, by people flicking abacus beads, would I still feel exactly the same? It’s outrageous to admit it—but the answer has to be yes.

  What does that say about real time, and real space?

  I lie in bed, wondering: Do I still want to wake from this dream? The question remains academic, though; I still don’t have any choice.

  “I’d like to talk to Elizabeth.”

  Squeak. “That’s not possible.”

  “Not possible? Why don’t you just ask her?”

  Squeak. “I can’t do that, Paul. She doesn’t even know you exist.”

  I stare at the screen. “But … I was going to tell her! As soon as I had a Copy who survived, I was going to tell her everything, explain everything—”

  Squeak. The djinn says drily, “Or so we thought.”

  “I don’t believe it! Your life’s great ambition is finally being fulfilled—and you can’t even share it with the one woman …”

  Squeak. His face turns to stone. “I really don’t wish to discuss this. Can we get on with the experiment, please?”

  “Oh, sure. Don’t let me hold things up. I almost forgot: you turned forty-five while I slept, didn’t you? Many happy returns—but I’d better not waste too much time on congratulations. I don’t want you dying of old age in the middle of the conversation.”

  Squeak. “Ah, but you’re wrong. I took some short cuts while you slept—shut down ninety percent of the model, cheated on most of the rest. You got six hours sleep in ten hours’ real time. Not a bad job, I thought.”

  “You had no right to do that!”

  Squeak. “Be practical. Ask yourself what you’d have done in my place.”

  “It’s not a joke!” I can sense the streak of paranoia in my anger; I struggle to find a rational excuse. “The experiment is worthless if you’re going to intervene at random. Precise, controlled changes—that’s the whole point. You have to promise me you won’t do it again.”

  Squeak. “You’re the one who was complaining about waste. Someone has to think about conserving our dwindling resources.”

  “Promise me!”

  Squeak. He shrugs. “All right. You have my word: no more ad hoc intervention.”

  Conserving our dwindling resources? What will he do, when he can no longer afford to keep me running? Store me until he can raise the money to start me up again, of course. In the long term, set up a trust fund; it would only have to earn enough to run me part time, at first: keep me in touch with the world, stave off excessive culture shock. Eventually, computing technology is sure to transcend the current hurdles, and once again enter a phase of plummeting costs and increasing speed.

  Of course, all these reassuring plans were made by a man with two futures. Will he really want to keep an old copy running, when he could save his money for a death-bed scan, and “his own” immortality? I don’t know. And I may not be sure if I want to survive—but I wish the choice could be mine.

  We start the second experiment. I do my best to concentrate, although I’m angry and distracted—and very nearly convinced that my dutiful introspection is pointless. Until the model itself is changed—not just the detailed way it’s computed—it remains a mathematical certainty that the subject and the control will end up with identical brains. If the subject claims to have experienced anything out of the ordinary, then so will the control—proving that the effect was spurious.

  And yet, I still can’t shrug off any of this as “trivial.” Durham was right about one thing: there’s no dishonor in confirming the obvious—and when it’s as bizarre, as counterintuitive as this, the only way to believe it is to experience it firsthand.

  This time, the model will be described at the standard resolution of one millisecond, throughout—but the order in which the states are computed will be varied.

  Squeak. “Experiment two, trial number one. Reverse order.”

  I count, “One. Two. Three.” After an initial leap into the future, I’m now traveling backward through real time. I wish I could view an external event on the terminal—some entropic cliché like a vase being smashed—and dwell on the fact that it was me, not the image, that was being rewound … but that would betray the difference between subject and control. Unless the control was shown an artificially reversed version of the same thing? Reversed how, though, if the vase was destroyed in real time? The control would have to be run separately, after the event. Ah, but even the subject would have to see a delayed version, because computing his real-time-first but model-time-final state would require information on all his model-time-earlier perceptions of the broken vase.

  “Eight. Nine. Ten.” Another imperceptible leap into the future, and the djinn reappears.

  Squeak. “Trial number two. Odd numbered states, then even.”

  In external terms, I will count to ten … then forget having done so, and count again.

  And from my point of view? As I count, once only, the external world—even if I can’t see it—is flickering back and forth between two separate regions of time, which have been chopped up into seventeen-millisecond portions, and interleaved.

  So which of us is right? Relativity may insist upon equal status for all reference frames … but the coordinate transformations it describes are smooth—possibly extreme, but always continuous. One observer’s spacetime can be stretched and deformed in the eyes of another—but it can’t be sliced like a loaf of bread, and then shuffled like a deck of cards.

  “Every tenth state, in ten sets.”

  If I insisted on being parochial, I’d have to claim that the outside world was now rapidly cycling through fragments of time drawn from ten distinct periods. The trouble is, this allegedly shuddering universe is home to all the processes that implement me, and they must—in some objective, absolute sense—be running smoothly, bound together in unbroken causal flow, or I wouldn’t even exist. My perspective is artificial, a contrivance relying on an underlying, continuous reality.

  “Every twentieth state, in twenty sets.”

  Nineteen episodes of amnesia, nineteen new beginnings. How can I swallow such a convoluted explanation for ten perfectly ordinary seconds of my life?

  “Every hundredth state, in one hundred sets.”

  I’ve lost any real feeling for what’s happening to me. I just count.

  “Pseudo-random ordering of states.”

  “One. Two. Three.”

  Now I am dust. Uncorrelated moments scattered throughout real time. Yet the pattern of my awareness remains perfectly intact: it finds itself, assembles itself from these scrambled fragments. I’ve been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle—but my dissection and shuffling are transparent to me. On their own terms, the pieces remain connected

  How? Through the fact that every state reflects its entire model-time past? Is the jigsaw analogy wrong—am I more like the fragments of a hologram? But in each millisecond snapshot, do I recall and review all that’s gone before? Of course not! In each snapshot, I do nothing. In the computations between them, then? Computations that drag me into the past and tire future at random—wildly adding and subtracting experience, until it all cancels out in the end—or rather, all adds up to the very same effect as ten subjective seconds of continuity.

  “Eight. Nine. Ten.”

  Squeak. “You’re sweating.”

  “Both of me?”

  Squeak. He laughs. “What do you think?”

  “Do me a favor. The experiment is over. Shut down on
e of me—control or subject, I don’t care.”

  Squeak. “Done.”

  “Now there’s no need to conceal anything, is there? So run the pseudorandom effect on me again—and stay on-line. This time, you count to ten.”

  Squeak. He shakes his head. “Can’t do it, Paul. Think about it: You can’t be computed non-sequentially when past perceptions aren’t known.”

  Of course; the broken vase problem all over again. I say, “Record yourself, then, and use that.”

  He seems to find the request amusing, but he indulges me; he even slows down the recording, so it lasts ten of my own seconds. I watch his blurred lips and jaws, listen to the drone of white noise.

  Squeak. “Happy now?”

  “You did scramble me, and not the recording?”

  Squeak. “Of course. Your wish is my command.”

  “Yeah? Then do it again.”

  He grimaces, but obliges.

  “Now, scramble the recording.”

  It looks just the same. Of course.

  “Again.”

  Squeak. “What’s the point of all this?”

  “Just do it.”

  I’m convinced that I’m on the verge of a profound insight—arising, not from any revelatory aberration in my mental processes, but from the “obvious,” “inevitable” fact that the wildest permutations of the relationship between model time and real time leave me perfectly intact. I’ve accepted the near certainty of this, tacitly, for twenty years—but the experience is provocative in a way that the abstract understanding never could be.

  It needs to be pushed further, though. The truth has to be shaken out of me.

  “When do we move on to the next stage?”

  Squeak. “Why so keen all of a sudden?”

  “Nothing’s changed. I just want to get it over and done with.”

  Squeak. “Well, lining up all the other machines is taking some delicate negotiations. The network allocation software isn’t designed to accommodate whims about geography. It’s a bit like going to a bank and asking to deposit some money … at a certain location in a particular computer’s memory. Basically, people think I’m crazy.”

  I feel a momentary pang of empathy, recalling my own anticipation of these difficulties. Empathy verging on identification. I smother it, though; we’re two utterly different people now, with different problems and different goals, and the stupidest thing I could do would be to forget that.

  Squeak. “I could suspend you while I finalize the arrangements, save you the boredom, if that’s what you want.”

  I have a lot to think about, and not just the implications of the last experiment. If he gets into the habit of shutting me down at every opportunity, I’ll “soon” find myself faced with decisions that I’m not prepared to make.

  “Thanks. But I’d rather wait.”

  I walk around the block a few times, to stretch my legs and switch off my mind. I can’t dwell on the knowledge of what I am, every waking moment; if I did, I’d soon go mad. There’s no doubt that the familiar streetscape helps me forget my bizarre nature, lets me take myself for granted and run on autopilot for a while.

  It’s hard to separate fact from rumor, but apparently even the gigarich tend to live in relatively mundane surroundings, favoring realism over power fantasies. A few models-of-psychotics have reportedly set themselves up as dictators in opulent palaces, waited on hand and foot, but most Copies have aimed for an illusion of continuity. If you desperately want to convince yourself that you are the same person as your memories suggest, the worst thing to do would be to swan around a virtual antiquity (with mod cons), pretending to be Cleopatra or Ramses II.

  I certainly don’t believe that I “am” my original, but…why do I believe that I exist at all? What gives me my sense of identity? Continuity. Consistency. Once I would have dragged in cause and effect, but I’m not sure that I still can. The cause and effect that underlies me bears no resemblance whatsoever to the pattern of my experience—not now, and least of all when the software was dragging me back and forth through time. I can’t deny that the computer which runs me is obeying the real-time physical laws—and I’m sure that, to a real-time observer, those laws would provide a completely satisfactory explanation for every pulse of laser light that constitutes my world, my flesh, my being. And yet … if it makes no perceptible difference to me whether I’m a biological creature, embodied in real cells built of real proteins built of real atoms built of real electrons and quarks… or a randomly time-scrambled set of descriptions of a crude model-of-a-brain … then surely the pattern is all, and cause and effect are irrelevant. The whole experience might just as well have arisen by chance.

  Is that conceivable? Suppose an intentionally haywire computer sat for a thousand years or more, twitching from state to state in the sway of nothing but electrical noise. Might it embody consciousness?

  In real time, the answer is: probably not—the chance of any kind of coherence arising at random being so small. Real time, though, is only one possible reference frame; what about all the others? If the states the machine passed through can be re-ordered in time arbitrarily (with some states omitted—perhaps most omitted, if need be) then who knows what kind of elaborate order might emerge from the chaos?

  Is that fatuous? As absurd, as empty, as claiming that every large-enough quantity of rock—contiguous or not—contains Michelangelo’s David, and every warehouse full of paint and canvas contains the complete works of Rembrandt and Picasso—not in any mere latent form, awaiting some skilful forger to physically rearrange them, but solely by virtue of the potential redefinition of the coordinates of space-time?

  For a statue or a painting, yes, it’s a hollow claim—where is the observer who perceives the paint to be in contact with the canvas, the stone figure to be suitably delineated by air?

  If the pattern in question is not an isolated object, though, but a self-contained world, complete with at least one observer to join up the dots …

  There’s no doubt that it’s possible. I’ve done it. I’ve assembled myself and my world—effortlessly—from the dust of randomly scattered states, from apparent noise in real time. Specially contrived noise, admittedly—but given enough of the real thing, there’s no reason to believe that some subset of it wouldn’t include patterns, embody relationships, as complex and coherent as the ones which underly me.

  I return to the apartment, fighting off a sense of giddiness and unreality. Do I still want to bail out? No. No! I still wish that he’d never created me—but how can I declare that I’d happily wake and forget myself—wake and “reclaim” my life—when already I’ve come to an insight that he never would have reached himself?

  The djinn looks tired and frayed; all the begging and bribery he must have been through to set this up seems to have taken its toll.

  Squeak. “Experiment three, trial zero. Baseline data. All computations performed by processor cluster number four six two, Hitachi Supercomputer Facility, Tokyo.”

  “One. Two. Three.” Nice to know where I am, at last. Never visited Japan before. “Four. Five. Six.” And in my own terms, I still haven’t. The view out the window is Sydney, not Tokyo. Why should I defer to external descriptions? “Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.”

  Squeak. “Trial number one. Model partitioned into five hundred sections, run on five hundred processor clusters, distributed globally.”

  I count. Five hundred clusters. Five only for the crudely modeled external world; all the rest are allocated to my body—and most to the brain, of course. I lift my hand to my eyes—and the information flow that grants me motor control and sight now traverses tens of thousands of kilometers of optical cable. This introduces no perceptible delays; each part of me simply hibernates when necessary, waiting for the requisite feedback from around the world. Moderately distributed processing is one thing, but this is pure lunacy, computationally and economically. I must be costing at least a hundred times as much as usual—not quite five hundred, since each cluste
r’s capacity is only being partly used—and my model-time to real-time factor must be more like fifty than seventeen.

  Squeak. “Trial number two. One thousand sections, one thousand clusters. “

  Brain the size of a planet—and here I am, counting to ten. I recall the perennial—naive and paranoid—fear that all the networked computers of the world might one day spontaneously give birth to a global hypermind—but I am, almost certainly, the first planet-sized intelligence on Earth- I don’t feel much like a digital Gaia, though. I feel like an ordinary human being sitting in an ordinary armchair.

  Squeak. “Trial number three. Model partitioned into fifty sections and twenty time sets, implemented on one thousand clusters.”

  “One. Two. Three.” I try to imagine the outside world in my terms, but it’s almost impossible. Not only am I scattered across the globe, but widely separated machine are simultaneously computing different moments of model-time. Is the distance from Tokyo to New York now the length of my corpus callosum? Has the planet been shrunk to the size of my skull—and banished from time altogether, except for the fifty points that contribute to my notion of the Present?

  Such a pathological transformation seems nonsensical—but in some hypothetical space traveler’s eyes, the whole planet is virtually frozen in time and flat as a pancake. Relativity declare, that this point of view is perfectly valid—but mine is not. Relativity permits continuous deformation, but no cutting and pasting. Why? Because it must allow for cause and effect. Influences must be localized, traveling from point to point at a finite velocity; chop up space-time and rearrange it, and the causal structure would fall apart.

  What if you’re an observer, though, who has no causal structure? A self-aware pattern appearing by chance in the random twitches of a noise machine, your time coordinate dancing back and forth through causally respectable “real time”? Why should you be declared a second-class being, with no right to see the universe your way? What fundamental difference is there between so-called cause and effect, and any other internally consistent pattern of perceptions?