The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Very good,’ said Kostritsky. ‘It’s pleasing to have our confidence in you justified. Still something of the professional scientist somewhere inside the garbage disposal man.’

  ‘The fuck!’ I said, stung, and unable for the moment to think of a wittier retort.

  ‘Of course you are correct. Until very recently that’s been true. Until very recently computer thought was subject to similar limitations with respect to accessing the Ding an sich as we are ourselves. That’s not surprising, when you think of it. We made them in our image. But, latterly, we’ve been building new kinds of computer, on radically different principles. And we’ve discovered that, once you abandon the notion of trying to copy human consciousness, AI is really quite easy to achieve.’

  I digested this. It was – well, huge. ‘You’ve done this?’

  ‘We have, yes.’

  ‘You’ve built functioning AI? Here, in this institute?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘A rational, sentient, intelligence consciousness, unfettered by the constraints of space and time? One that can see into the Ding an sich?’

  ‘Essentially, yes. Pretty much.’

  ‘Pretty much?’ I boggled.

  ‘There’s work still to be done,’ she conceded airily. ‘But we’ve done enough to confirm that Kant was right.’

  I took a long breath in. ‘And I’m supposed just to talk your word on that, am I?’

  ‘Talk my word?’

  I breathed out. ‘Take your word, I mean.’

  ‘No, Charles,’ she said, with perfect ingenuity. ‘You’re supposed to see for yourself. That’s why we invited you here.’

  ‘You’ve done this thing,’ I said, ‘but you haven’t announced it to the world. It’s like you don’t want the Nobel Prize.’

  ‘There’s no Nobel Prize in computing,’ she observed mildly.

  ‘Or whatever the hell the equivalent— Look: come on. You’ve really done what you’re claiming, if you have, I mean, actual working AI: the world will go crazy. Crazy! Ticker-tape parades, chat shows, your own brand of perfume. Why haven’t you announced it?’

  ‘The main reason,’ she said, and stopped. She yawned, enormously. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I am tired. The main reason is that AI is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end.’

  ‘What end?’

  ‘Direct manipulation of the Ding an sich of course. Come on, Charles, think! Can’t you imagine the possibilities?’

  ‘Possibilities.’

  ‘Take space. Distance could be eradicated. And not just human-scale distances. Stellar distances. We could reach the stars, the galaxies. And time? Well, time travel may be more than reality can bear, but we’re working on slowing time … giving ourselves as much time as we need to compute any problem, to prolong consciousness as long as we wish. Really, even a simpleton can see how revolutionary it would be to break through the prison of space and time.’

  I felt dizzy. ‘You’re a cult leader, trying to brainwash me. That’s all—’ I didn’t know what it was all. I stopped.

  ‘It’s incredible, I know. But, look, we’re not there yet. There are certain, uh, obstacles to clear.’ She yawned again, massively, and poked her now-cold scrambled egg with her fork. ‘We have a broad three-point strategy. First, to get a clear enough view of the thing itself to confirm, or deny, Kant’s theories. Well, we’ve done that.’

  ‘Jesus Beelzebub,’ I said.

  ‘Second, retrieve specific data about the thing in itself, via an AI unfettered by time and space. And third, to use those tools to begin manipulating the thing itself. That’s what we’re still working on. And that’s why we need you.’

  ‘Me.’ I shook my head.

  ‘You and your friend.’

  ‘Roy. Not my friend. Very much not.’

  ‘As you said yourself: back in the 1980s computing was too primitive to support AI. Those old machines were slow, with very meagre processing and memory. And they were locked into the structures of space and time, in terms of their operating parameters. It shouldn’t have been possible to do anything with such a machine, as far as getting access to the Ding an sich was concerned. Yet Curtius did it. We don’t know how. It shouldn’t even have been possible – yet he did. We figure he was some manner of genius.’

  ‘That would be genius spelled p, s, y, c, h and o.’

  ‘Mentally challenged, yes certainly. Difficult. Geniuses often are. But he could be the one to provide the key. The key to accessing the real reality. And once we do that … well, everything changes. For all of humanity.’

  ‘Accessing the thing itself.’ Nausea uncoiled itself in my gut. ‘Look if that’s what happened to the two of us in Antarctica then my very-much advice to you would very-much be: leave it the fuck alone.’ There were flickers of light in the corner of my eye. My hands were trembling.

  ‘We understand that your experience,’ she said, ‘was not … pleasant.’

  ‘I’m going to be sick,’ I said. And indeed a hot sensation of nausea was churning through my gut. ‘All this abstract metaphysics— I didn’t make the connection with the South Pole. Jesus, Professor: what if you connect with the Ding an sich and it turns out to be, like, a hell dimension?’

  ‘There’s no danger of that.’

  Demons flickered in my mind’s eye. Leering, mocking. What I had done with Irma last night: had her consent been, shall we say, compromised? Damned, damned, damned. A glimpse of the real reality and it was darkness, visible. ‘You didn’t see them,’ I said, and my stomach clenches sharply. My filled tooth bulged and throbbed.

  I got up, and stepped briskly away from the table. There was a white plastic bin, elephant’s-foot-size, and with nothing inside it except a discarded Twix wrapper. I held it to my chest, and waited. But the urge to vomit passed. All through this – it must have lasted three or four minutes – Professor Kostritsky sat patiently, looking at me. I began to feel self-conscious, standing there. So I returned to the chair, and sat down with the bin in my lap. ‘You didn’t see them,’ I repeated.

  ‘You don’t know what you saw. Certainly something disorienting and upsetting happened. But that’s not to say that this was some profound insight into the essential nature of reality. Maybe it wasn’t what you saw but the mode of seeing it that was so … debilitating.’

  It dawned on me that, for the first time in decades, I was sitting in a room with a person who actually believed that what happened to me in Antarctica was real. I felt dizzy again. ‘That’s putting it mildly.’

  ‘We have models. Best-guess scenarios which, with the most recent data we’ve accumulated, are I think pretty good guesses. That suggests that as the space and time modalities are … reduced, shall we say. As that happens, it’s likely an unprepared consciousness would become disoriented. That it would experience rapid and alarming shifts in spatial and temporal scale, foldings, fractal shudders. I didn’t experience what you experienced, of course. But your account of them was entirely consistent with what we would expect from our models. And those models rule out medieval demons. Believe me, they do.’

  ‘Take your word for it.’

  ‘Once again: no. Do the work yourself. That’s an invitation. It’s an invitation to advanced scientific work – a job, a salary. A position here in the Institute.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said. Because thinking it might be real was making my gut churn again.

  ‘You,’ said Kostritsky. ‘That is, you and Curtius, you are the only two people in the world to have shared that experience, whatever the experience was. Take a look at yourself: highly intelligent, articulate, creative. Yet you’re working as a bin-man. You think that’s compatible with your intellectual potential? We’re offering you something real, here. It will stretch you, challenge you. It will pay considerably better than your council wages. And most of all it will give you the chance to be part of the greatest scientific advance in human history.’ She opened her hands. ‘All we ask in return is that you apply your, uh, fri
endship to Mr Curtius as a lever. We need him. He may be the difference between success and failure.’

  :6:

  So I stayed. I didn’t follow through on my low-down principle of using Irma as a bargaining tool. I simply stayed. I slept in my room, and ate in the canteen, and had further conversations with Kos. I met a few of the other staff. I wandered around the grounds as May turned into June, and the land became gorgeous with summer life. I met other Institute employees, and they were all pleasant, welcoming, well-adjusted people. I had bad dreams, and the demons capered at the edge of my vision sometimes, but it was late spring and early summer and the sun came out. Light everywhere. Light falling from above, light shining from within.

  The bald fact is: I was converted. I had further conversations with Kos about what the Institute hoped to achieve. It was a lot: not just a single major advance with the potential to revolutionise human life, but a whole bunch of major advances that would turn human life verso-reverso. To access the thing itself, the reality behind human perception, through carefully programmed AIs. To manipulate it.

  ‘The four modalities,’ was how Kos explained it. ‘These are what we hope to transcend – if we can make the system work. These modalities are the four walls of our prison, you could say, and we’re planning ways to break through them.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Run through them one more time, would you?’

  ‘The first is quantity. That means number. That means space, and time, both of which are numberable. Spaces is always so many metres long, so many wide, so many high. Time means so many seconds, countable forwards or backwards. And it is those metres, in their trillions upon trillions, that keep us from simply stepping into the surface of a paradise planet in orbit around another star – that keep us from spreading humanity through the whole cosmos.’

  ‘I don’t see why quantity is subdivided into three. That’s just Kant’s weird three/four fetish. That’s the neatness thing again.’

  ‘It makes sense, though. He’s saying quantity comes in three kinds – one, many, all.’

  ‘But multiply each by space and time. Shouldn’t that be six?’

  ‘It would be, if space and time were completely separate things. But Einstein says they’re not. Space and time are the same thing. Spacetime. That’s not so important.’

  ‘It’s not?’

  ‘What’s important is what this can do for us. If we can master quantity – the measurements of space and time that structure our universe – only imagine! Quantity is the gold circle at the centre of our target. Here at the Institute, I mean. That’s the jackpot. If we can tweak our approaches so as to be able to step past some – or even all – of the obstacles provided by the categories, then we can re-emerge where and when we like … well. Then the entire universe is our oyster. We could, for instance, simply sidestep the very many light years between Earth and the stars.’

  ‘So quantity is top of our wish list.’ How quickly I had started talking about us and ours. Ironic, really, looking back. I was part of the totality. Or I thought I was. ‘What about quality?’

  ‘That’s slipperier. Quality, says Kant, is the degree of reality of something. Some things are only very faintly real, have only a very faint effect upon us. Like a feather tickling your elbow. Some things have much more palpable or vivid quality. Pushed to an extreme, quality is our perception of pain – agony, even. That’s a necessary thing, obviously, for the proper functioning of a human body. But when we’re talking, as we are here, about manipulating it, altering it … well, we don’t want to trip the agony wire if we can help it.’

  ‘So Kant’s three inflections of quality, are, what? A tiny bit, a moderate amount, a lot?’

  ‘No. The modifications Kant suggests are reality, negation, limitation. Professional philosophers have argued long and hard over what he meant by that. This is what I understand by what he says: quality is the filling up of time with a sensation. When time is completely filled, we have very vivid, very strong sensations. When it is meagrely filled, we have weaker sensations. So that’s what reality is, for us. It is the experience of sensation in time. Negation is the opposite; the lack of sensation in time. And limitation is scale between the two, the range of degrees.’

  ‘That’s kind of what I said. But we want to leave that alone?’

  ‘Our best guess, from our models, is that it would be better to keep well away. Sensation might be pleasurable, of course; and the modulation of such sensation to fill up our reality would be, well, orgasmic.’

  ‘I can imagine the commercial applications.’

  ‘Yes. Well. But until we understand the tolerances, the precision, with which we are able to manipulate the Ding an sich, we just need to be careful. Bliss might flip over to agony in unpredictable ways.’

  ‘OK: the third?’

  ‘The third is relation. He means the order in which things are arranged, or in which they happen in time. That’s Kant’s way of speaking of things like cause and effect, necessary and accidental qualities of things, reciprocity.’

  ‘How’s this not the same as the first category?’

  ‘Well, because the things you’re talking about – unity, multiplicity, totality – are not features of the thing itself. Only of the way we perceive it, the way we intuit it. Relation, likewise. We don’t just perceive space and time, we perceive space ordered in a certain way, time structured in a certain way.’

  ‘So what happens if we sidestep this category?’

  ‘Tricky to say. Maybe chaos. Things possess specificity, distinctiveness. That’s good. We don’t want that to stop it being true. If we manipulate the Ding an sich directly in ways that affect this, maybe those same things are no longer able to inhere. Worst case: atoms fuse with nuclear-explosive consequences. But maybe not. The real question, I’d say, is whether relation is easier to manipulate – in the thing itself, I mean – than quantity. Maybe we can’t sidestep the thousand light years between us and our dream planet. But perhaps we can instead manipulate the way those thousand light years relate to one another. Make them all stack up on top instead of stretch out one after the other. Fold them into a fractal spiral. I don’t know. So, our prime target is quantity, but relation is Plan B, if we can’t get that to work.’

  ‘I’m still not grasping what Kant’s subsets here are, exactly.’

  ‘One is inherence-subsistence, which is basically the thingness of things. Two is causality and community. The third is Kant’s way of bringing action and passivity into his model. Some things have agency, some things are passive, and there is a reciprocal relationship between those two things. The white billiard ball is in motion, and strikes the red billiard ball. The white ball is the agent, the red one the patient; and, like Newton says, the force of one on the other is equal and opposite. So that’s that. Community, he calls it.’

  ‘Seems an odd word to describe what you just said.’

  ‘It’s just terminology. Think of a different word if you like. The ball is spherical and has mass, that’s inherent – that’s substance. It’s white and is made of ivory and so on: that’s accident, subsistence. It wouldn’t matter if it were blue and made of plastic, provided it had the same shape and the same mass. Whether the ball is white or blue makes no difference to how it strikes the red ball. And taken together, the white ball striking is the cause of the red ball suddenly shooting off. Taken together there’s an equal-and-opposite community of forces.’

  ‘So that just leaves the fourth of Kant’s categories.’

  ‘This one is the hardest to get your head around; or at least, I found it so. Modality.’

  ‘Modality.’

  ‘Three varieties of this: possibility, existence and necessity. The wrinkle is that these words only capture half the picture. Possibility is the other half of impossibility, or impossibility is the other half of possibilities. A triangle whose angles add up to 200 degrees is impossible in a flat Euclidean plane, but possible in a non-Euclidean space like the curved surface of the Eart
h. The two have a reciprocal relationship to one another. Some things exist, and others don’t exist. We can think of either kind of thing. Some things must be the way they are; other things are only the way they are because they depend on other things. Or maybe they’re Schrodinger-random. Never mind about that for now. It makes no sense for us to tinker with modality. Of all the four categories it’s the one lowest on our to-do list. We don’t want to tinker with the Ding an sich and discover that we’ve somehow messed up the difference between possible and impossible in our world. It’s really hard to see how that could end well.’

  Total vision, I thought. Or all the rest is desolation. The capering demons’ faces were in constant motion, like serpentine flames in a fireplace. I studied the ground, and had individual sessions with members of the team to bring me up to speed.

  :7:

  I settled into my new mode of life. I even found myself enjoying it. I signed a non-disclosure contract, and it mentioned fearful sanctions if I dared spill any of the Institute’s beans. But nothing could be as bad as my life had once been.

  For the first week or so I didn’t see Irma. Instead I spent time with Sue Bao, one of the workers on the project, trying to build (she excitedly told me) a matter transporter. Sue in turn introduced me to a woman called Jennifer who worked security, and who shook my hand solemnly. ‘You’re in seventeen,’ she said, as if repeating the phrase helped her memorise it. ‘Seventeen. Seventeen.’

  ‘Surprising there are that many rooms,’ I observed.

  ‘Most of us live off-site,’ said Sue. ‘Not many bodies on campus these days. But a few years ago we would very often fly people in, from all over the world. There’s a lot of programming expertise in Russia – you’d be surprised.’

  ‘So who else is staying on site?’