by Greg Egan
Squeak. “Trial number four. Model partitioned into fifty sections; sections and states pseudo-randomly allocated to one thousand clusters.”
“One. Two. Three.”
I stop counting, stretch my arms wide, stand. I wheel around once, to examine the room, checking that it’s still intact, complete. Then I whisper, “This is dust. All dust. This room, this moment, is scattered across the planet, scattered across five hundred seconds or more—and yet it remains whole. Don’t you see what that means?”
The djinn reappears, frowning, but I don’t give him a chance to chastise me.
“Listen! If I can assemble myself, this room—if I can construct my own coherent space-time out of nothing but scattered fragments—then what makes you think that you’re not doing the very same thing?
“Imagine…a universe completely without structure, without topology. No space, no time; just a set of random events. I’d call them ‘isolated,’ but that’s not the right word; there’s simply no such thing as distance. Perhaps I shouldn’t even say ‘random,’ since that makes it sound like there’s some kind of natural order in which to consider them, one by one, and find them random—but there isn’t.
“What are these events? We’d describe them as points in space-time, and assign them coordinates—times and places—but if that’s not permitted, what’s left? Values of all the fundamental particle fields? Maybe even that’s assuming too much. Let’s just say that each event is a collection of numbers.
“Now, if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from the background noise of all the other events taking place on this planet … then why shouldn’t the pattern we think of as ‘the universe’ assemble itself, find itself in exactly the same way?”
The djinn’s expression hovers between alarm and irritation.
Squeak. “Paul … I don’t see the point of any of this. Space-time is a construct; the real universe is nothing but a sea of disconnected events…it’s all just metaphysical waffle. An unfalsifiable hypothesis. What explanatory value does it have? what difference would it make?”
“What difference? We perceive—we inhabit—one arrangement of the set of events. But why should that arrangement be unique? There’s no reason to believe that the pattern we’ve found is the only coherent way of ordering the dust. There must be billions of other universes coexisting with us, made of the very same stuff—just differently arranged. If I can perceive events thousands of kilometers and hundred of seconds apart to be side-by-side and simultaneous, there could be worlds, and creatures, built up from what we’d think of as points in space-time scattered all over the galaxy, all over the universe. We’re one possible solution to a giant cosmic anagram … but it would be ludicrous to think that we’re the only one.”
Squeak. “So where are all the left-over letters? If this primordial alphabet soup really is random, don’t you think it’s highly unlikely that we could structure the whole thing?”
That throws me, but only for a moment. “We haven’t structured the whole thing. The universe is random, at the quantum level. Macroscopically, the pattern seems to be perfect; microscopically, it decays into uncertainty- We’ve swept the residue of randomness down to the lowest level. The anagram analogy’s flawed; the building blocks are more like random pixels than random letters. Given a sufficient number of random pixels, you could construct virtually any image you liked—but under close inspection, the randomness would be revealed.”
Squeak. “None of this is testable. How would we ever observe a planet whose constituent parts were scattered across the universe? Let alone communicate with its hypothetical inhabitants? I don’t doubt that what you’re saying has a certain—purely mathematical—validity: grind the universe down to a fine enough level, and I’m sure the dust could be rearranged in other ways that make as much sense as the original. If these rearranged worlds are inaccessible, though, it’s all angels on the heads of pins.”
“How can you say that? I’ve been rearranged! I’ve visited another world!”
Squeak. “If you did, it was an artificial world; created, not discovered.”
“Found a pattern, created a pattern … there’s no real difference.”
Squeak. “Paul, you know that everything you experienced was due to the way your model was programmed; there’s no need to invoke other worlds. The state of your brain at every moment can be explained completely in terms of this arrangement of time and space.”
“Of course! Your pattern hasn’t been violated; the computers did exactly what was expected of them. That doesn’t make my perspective any less valid, though. Stop thinking of explanations, causes and effects; there are only patterns. The scattered events that formed my experience had an internal consistency every bit as real as the consistency in the actions of the computers. And perhaps the computers didn’t provide all of it.”
Squeak. “What do you mean?”
“The gaps, in experiment one. What filled them in? What was I made of, when the processors weren’t describing me? Well…it’s a big universe’ Plenty of dust to be me, in between descriptions. Plenty of events—nothing to do with your computers, maybe nothing to do with your planet or your epoch—out of which to construct ten seconds of experience’ consistent with everything that had gone before—and everything yet to come.”
Squeak. The djinn looks seriously worried now. “Paul, listen: you’re a Copy in a virtual environment under computer control. Nothing more, nothing less. These experiments prove that your internal sense of space and time is invariant—as expected. But your states are computed, your memories have to be what they would have been without manipulation. You haven’t visited any other worlds, you haven’t built yourself out of fragments of distant galaxies.”
I laugh. “Your stupidity is … surreal. What the fuck did you create me for, if you’re not even going to listen to me? We’ve stumbled onto something of cosmic importance! Forget about farting around with the details of neural models; we have to devote all our resources to exploring this further. We’ve had a glimpse of the truth behind … everything: space, time, the laws of physics. You can’t shrug that off by saying that my states were inevitable.”
Squeak. “Control and subject are still identical.”
I scream with exasperation. “Of course they are, you moron! That’s the whole point! Like acceleration and gravity in General Relativity, it’s the equivalent experience of two different observers that blows the old paradigm apart.”
Squeak. The djinn mutters, dismayed, “Elizabeth said this would happen. She said it was only a matter of time before you’d lose touch.”
I stare at him. “Elizabeth? You said you hadn’t even told her!”
Squeak. “Well, I have. I didn’t let you know, because I didn’t think you’d want to hear her reaction.”
“Which was?”
Squeak. “She wanted to shut you down. She said I was … seriously disturbed, to even think about doing this. She said she’d find help for me”
“Yeah? Well, what would she know? Ignore her!”
Squeak. He frowns apologetically, an expression I recognize from the inside, and my guts turn to ice. “Paul, maybe I should pause you, while I think things over. Elizabeth does care about me, more than I realized. I should talk it through with her again.”
“No. Oh, shit, no.” He won’t restart me from this point. Even if he doesn’t abandon the project, he’ll go back to the scan, and try something afferent, to keep me in line. Maybe he won’t perform the first experiments at all—the ones which gave me this insight. The ones which made me who I am.
Squeak. “Only temporarily. I promise. Trust me.”
“Paul. Please.”
He reaches off-screen.
“No!”
There’s a hand gripping my forearm. I try to shake it off, but my arm barely moves, and a terrible aching starts up in my shoulder. I open my eyes, close them again in pain. I try again, On the fifth or sixth attempt, I manage to see a face through washed-out bri
ghtness and tears.
Elizabeth.
She holds a cup to my lips. I take a sip, splutter and choke, but then force some of the thin sweet liquid down.
She says, “You’ll be okay soon. Just don’t try to move too quickly.”
“Why are you here?” I cough, shake my head, wish I hadn’t. I’m touched, but confused. Why did my original lie, and claim that she wanted to shut me down, when in fact she was sympathetic enough to go through the arduous process of visiting me?
I’m lying on something like a dentist’s couch, in an unfamiliar room. I’m in a hospital gown; there’s a drip in my right arm, and a catheter in my urethra. I glance up to see an interface helmet, a bulky hemisphere of magnetic axon current inducers, suspended from a gantry, not far above my head. Fair enough, I suppose, to construct a simulated meeting place that looks like the room that her real body must be in; putting me in the couch, though, and giving me all the symptoms of a waking visitor, seems a little extreme.
I tap the couch with my left hand. “What’s the point of all this? You want me to know exactly what you’re going through? Okay. I’m grateful. And it’s good to see you.” I shudder with relief, and delayed shock. “Fantastic, to tell the truth.” I laugh weakly. “I honestly thought he was going to wipe me out. The man’s a complete lunatic. Believe me, you’re talking to his better half.”
She’s perched on a stool beside me. “Paul. Try to listen carefully to what I’m going to say. You’ll start to reintegrate the suppressed memories gradually, on your own, but it’ll help if I talk you through it all first. To start with, you’re not a Copy. You’re flesh and blood.”
I stare at her. “What kind of sadistic joke is that? Do you know how hard it was, how long it took me, to come to terms with the truth?”
She shakes her head. “It’s not a joke. I know you don’t remember yet, but after you made the scan that was going to run as Copy number five, you finally told me what you were doing. And I persuaded you not to run it—until you’d tried another experiment: putting yourself in its place. Finding out, first hand, what it would be forced to go through.
“And you agreed. You entered the virtual environment which the Copy would have inhabited—with your memories since the day of the scan suppressed, so you had no way of knowing that you were only a visitor.”
Her face betrays no hint of deception—but software can smooth that out. “I don’t believe you. How can I be the original? I spoke to the original. What am I supposed to believe? He was the Copy?”
She sighs, but says patiently, “Of course not. That would hardly spare the Copy any trauma, would it? The scan was never run. I controlled the puppet that played your ‘original’—software provided the vocabulary signature and body language, but I pulled the strings.”
I shake my head, and whisper, “Bremsstrahlung.” No interface window appears. I grip the couch and close my eyes, then laugh. “You say I agreed to this? What kind of masochist would do that? I’m going out of my mind! I don’t know what I am!”
She takes hold of my arm again. “Of course you’re still disoriented—but trust me, it won’t last long. And you know why you agreed. You were sick of Copies bailing out on you. One way or another, you have to come to terms with their experience. Spending a few days believing you were a Copy would make or break the project: you’d either end up truly prepared, at last, to give rise to a Copy who’d be able to cope with its fate—or you’d gain enough sympathy for their plight to stop creating them.”
A technician comes into the room and removes my drip and catheter. I prop myself up and look out through the windows of the room’s swing doors; I can see half a dozen people in the corridor. I bellow wordlessly at the top of my lungs; they all turn to stare in my direction. The technician says, mildly, “Your penis might sting for an hour or two.”
I slump back onto the couch and turn to Elizabeth. “You wouldn’t pay for reactive crowds. I wouldn’t pay for reactive crowds. Looks like you’re telling the truth.”
People, glorious people: thousands of strangers, meeting my eyes with suspicion or puzzlement, stepping out of my way on the street—or, more often, clearly, consciously refusing to. I’ll never feel alone in a crowd again; I remember what true invisibility is like.
The freedom of the city is so sweet. I walked the streets of Sydney for a full day, exploring every ugly shopping arcade, every piss-stinking litter-strewn park and alley, until, with aching feet, I squeezed my way home through the evening rush-hour, to watch the real-time news.
There is no room for doubt: I am not in a virtual environment. Nobody in the world could have reason to spend so much money, simply to deceive me.
When Elizabeth asks if my memories are back, I nod and say, of course. She doesn’t grill me on the details. In fact, having gone over her story so many times in my head, I can almost imagine the stages: my qualms after the fifth scan, repeatedly putting off running the model, confessing to Elizabeth about the project, accepting her challenge to experience for myself just what my Copies were suffering.
And if the suppressed memories haven’t actually integrated, well, I’ve checked the literature, and there’s a 2.9 percent risk of that happening.
I have an account from the database service which shows that I consulted the very same articles before.
I reread and replayed the news reports that I accessed from inside; I found no discrepancies. In fact, I’ve been reading a great deal of history, geography, and astronomy, and although I’m surprised now and then by details that I’d never learnt before, I can’t say that I’ve come across anything that definitely contradicts my prior understanding.
Everything is consistent. Everything is explicable.
I still can’t stop wondering, though, what might happen to a Copy who’s shut down, and never run again. A normal human death is one thing—woven into a much vaster tapestry, it’s a process that makes perfect sense. From the internal point of view of a copy whose model is simply halted, though, there is no explanation whatsoever for this “death”—just an edge where the pattern abruptly ends.
If a Copy could assemble itself from dust scattered across the world, and bridge the gaps in its existence with dust from across the universe, why should it ever come to an inconsistent end? Why shouldn’t the pattern keep on finding itself? Or find, perhaps, a larger pattern into which it could merge?
Perhaps it’s pointless to aspire to know the truth. If I was a Copy, and “found” this world, this arrangement of dust, then the seam will be, must be, flawless. For the patterns to merge, both “explanations” must be equally true. If I was a Copy, then it’s also true that I was the flesh-and-blood Paul Durham, believing he was a Copy.
Once I had two futures. Now I have two pasts.
Elizabeth asked me yesterday what decision I’d reached: to abandon my life’s obsession, or to forge ahead, now that I know firsthand what’s involved. My answer disappointed her, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever see her again.
In this world.
Today, I’m going to be scanned for the sixth time. I can’t give up now. I can’t discover the truth—but that doesn’t mean that nobody else can. If I make a Copy, run him for a few virtual days, then terminate him abruptly … then he, at least, will know if his pattern of experience continues. Again, there will be an “explanation”; again, the “new” flesh-and-blood Paul Durham will have an extra past. Inheriting my memories, perhaps he will repeat the whole process again.
And again. And again. Although the seams will always be perfect, the “explanations” will necessarily grow ever more “contrived,” less convincing, and the dust hypothesis will become ever more compelling.
I lie in bed in the predawn light, waiting for sunrise, staring into the future down this corridor of mirrors.
One thing nags at me. I could swear I had a dream—an elaborate fable, conveying some kind of insight—but my dreams are evanescent, and I don’t expect to remember what it was.
WORTHLESS
There’s nothing wrong with The Family
That a flame-thrower can’t fix
And there’s nothing wrong with the salt of the Earth
That couldn’t be cured with a well-aimed BRICK
I switch on the radio (when I have a chance), I scan the stations (now and then), listening for an echo of your voice. Wondering if you’ve found a new incarnation. Wondering if I’d recognise it, if you had. Oh, some brain-dead bitch has stolen one of your best riffs, and chants meaningless drivel over the top of an endlessly cycling sample―but my mind shuts her out, and my memory of you takes over:
Carve my name on your heart, forever
―with the blunt end of a feather
You said, “I’ll stay with you for a lifetime of pain
(just so long as it’s over by morning).”
I know what they say, the revisionists, the explainers: you were a glitch, an aberration; a bug in the software, nothing more. People could never have truly wanted to hear your “maudlin” voice, your “mealy mouthed whining,” your “smothering self pity.”
I did.
I still dream about you, I swear. Do you blame me, if I can’t hold on to my vision of you, lost on these dizzying sunlit plains, numb with contentment, the way I could when I was desperate, lonely, crippled? When I knew exactly who I was.
I still want you back. Badly. Sometimes.