by David Walton
“Okay,” Tyler said. “And that’s what you’ve simulated here; I get that.”
“That’s what I simulated with a hundred individuals,” she said. “And I thought they had hacked their world to create more land and allow for more descendants. That’s what it looked like—millions of Mikes living in a vast city, growing crops to feed themselves and reproducing.”
“And that’s not what was happening?”
“No. That’s the fascinating part. The other Mikes aren’t really Mikes, not by themselves. They’re not individuals. They’re each part of one of the original Mikes—whichever one they descended from.”
The road was gravelly with bits of silvery building material, ground down to pebbles by centuries of Mikes walking over them. The fidelity of the Realplanet simulation engine was pretty impressive. She picked up a handful and rattled them around in a loose fist. She couldn’t feel them, of course—she was navigating all this with a pair of glasses and a game controller—but the detail was good enough that she could forget that, for a time, and believe in her surroundings and the reality of her avatar.
“One of the hallmarks of sapience is the ability to generate hypotheticals,” she said. “Say I throw this pebble at you.” She hurled one at him, bouncing it off his chest. “I could keep on doing it for a while and discover that most of the time, nothing interesting happens, but if I hit you in the eye, I get a big reaction.”
“Very funny,” Tyler said.
“Animals learn that way sometimes,” she said. “You can train them using good and bad outcomes for behavior. A sapient being, however, can run those hypotheticals in its own head. I can figure out that you will react badly to a pebble thrown in your eye without having to actually do it. We run internal simulations of multiple possibilities and pick the one likely to give us the desired outcome. It’s that ability that allows us to imagine, to tell stories, to empathize with other people, even to contemplate the existence of God.”
“And you’re saying the ten million other Mikes fulfill that function for the original eighty-seven?”
“Exactly. They’re the means by which the eighty-seven run hypotheticals. They’re how they think, project, even communicate with each other. Like I said before, we think of evolution as an external process, but for the Mikes, it’s internal. They’re using the process of evolution provided them in the game to grow and develop their own thought process. They try out hypotheticals, consider the outcomes, let some futures live and others die. They’re not growing a society. They’re developing their own minds.”
Tyler rocked his head back, looking up at the simulated sky. “So you’re saying it is a hive mind,” he said. “Eighty-seven queens, each with a hundred thousand workers psychically linked to them.”
She tossed pebbles out into the road, one by one. “Not really. The metaphor doesn’t hold. A hive mind is one consciousness housed in multiple physical bodies. But the Mikes don’t have physical bodies. Their bodies are just simulations, an illusion created by the game. It’s more like we’re sitting inside one of the Mikes’ brains, watching personifications of its neurons and synapses go about the daily business of thinking.”
“But evolution is dumb,” Tyler objected. “It’s the opposite of an intelligent design, right? It’s just the result of variation in a population and changing survival conditions.”
Naomi laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Well, in this case, there is an intelligent designer. I like to think of myself as intelligent, anyway.”
Tyler grinned. “I’m talking about the process, though. Evolution as a mechanism isn’t intelligent. It doesn’t think.”
“The process of reinforcing neuron firing paths with positive feedback is pretty dumb, too,” she said. “But the emergent behavior is conscious, sapient thought. Evolution is a process of selection to meet certain criteria. The criteria and the variation are both inputs into the process. On a large scale, it could very easily be the basis of a mind.”
Tyler made a face. “It sounds like those old Gaia stories, like Foundation’s Edge, where the planet itself is conscious,” he said. “I mean, it’s a crazy cool idea. But how do you know? How can you tell for sure that these super-mikes really exist?”
She stopped throwing pebbles and met his gaze. “I found them.”
“You found them?”
“They’ve been hiding—their edits kept them off of the metrics reports as well—but I found them. Want to see?”
She stood, brushing the dust of the road off of her avatar’s body, and set off toward the north. They soon arrived at a field that was at the center of the original map. In the center of the field, she began to dig, using a pickax that came standard with every avatar, a throwback to Realplanet’s roots. She soon uncovered a foot, then a leg, then a body, and finally, a face. A Mike lay in the dirt, still partially buried and utterly still.
“That’s disturbing,” Tyler said. “What are they doing down there?”
“It’s a loophole in the game rules,” she said. “In the simulation, the greater their activity, the more light they need to maintain that activity. There’s a direct ratio. So if they do no activity—no physical activity as far as the simulation is concerned—they don’t need any light. They don’t run out, and they never die. Down there, nothing forces them to move. Also, they don’t get counted in the metrics, though I don’t know if they realize that or not.”
“This is one of the original eighty-seven?”
She nodded. “I think they’re all buried right here, but I haven’t dug them all up to be sure.”
“How can they control the other Mikes from down there?”
“Remember—this is a computer program, not a physical environment. Physical separation in the simulation means nothing. I originally wrote those programs to adapt to their environment with the goal of survival. I meant the simulated environment, of course, but they took it much further. They co-opted their entire environment—the operating system, the virtual hardware, even the evolutionary process of the game engine itself—to give themselves a survival advantage. They even . . .” Naomi’s voice caught, and she swallowed. She had to keep talking, though. This was the important part. It was why she needed Tyler’s help. “They even seem to have gained some awareness of the real, physical world and co- opted some of its principles for their own benefit. They’re . . . they’re . . .”
“Killing people,” Tyler finished.
She spilled it all, then: Min-seo’s death, discovering the bloody car, cleaning up afterwards. “She ran the script, and they killed her for it.”
“But, if what you’re saying is true,” Tyler said, “then that script didn’t really kill them. Not the sapient ones. It just, I don’t know, interrupted a conversation.”
“She destroyed whole generations of communication and thought,” Naomi said. “It’s like she gave them a sudden case of Alzheimer’s. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s more like she burned the Library at Alexandria. I can’t predict what they might have lost of their memories or personalities. What’s clear is that they knew it had been done to them, and could connect the real world manifestation of Min-seo with her activities in the simulation.”
“Which means they probably know we’re here right now.”
“They probably do.”
“Do they understand what we’re saying to each other?”
“I doubt it. Their language is utterly different from ours. They discuss ideas by playing out those ideas with Mikes in the simulation. There’s no indication that they understand English, or even if they did, that they would connect the sounds we’re making with the written words.”
“Even so . . . I think I’ve seen what I need to see here.”
“Okay. Signing off.”
Naomi slipped off her glasses and blinked in the comparably dim light of the living room. Tyler set his glasses on the coffee table and ran his fingers through his hair. “Whew,” he said.
Naomi felt sudde
nly nervous. She had just admitted to a crime that she and Brandon covered up. She’d given him power over her. What if he called the police and turned her in?
“What happens in the simulation if you disconnect the cars from the system?” Tyler said. “Does everything keep going, just disconnected from the real world?”
“They wouldn’t get paid,” she said. “No light, no food. They’d all die.”
“I thought most of them got paid for running imaginary cars.”
“They do, but the calculation is ultimately based on how well the real cars do. The amount of light available in the system changes according to performance of the real cars.”
“You could simulate that, though, couldn’t you? From the outside? You could hook up a simulation of the cars instead of the cars themselves, so that they keep getting rewarded, but without the ability to kill real people.”
“I could do better than that,” Naomi said. “The feedback interface is pretty simple. I could just consistently send back the same positive result, no matter what they do.”
“And what would happen in the real world? To the cars?”
“If I just disconnect, they would stop dead in the middle of the street. With an alternative system, though, I could switch from one to the other, hopefully without disruption. That’s why I need your help.” She grinned. “It just so happens there’s some excellent open source software to take its place.”
“And then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“What about the Mikes? What are you going to do about them? I’m guessing the price tag for their computing bandwidth is pretty hefty, and nobody’s going to pay that without some return. As soon as Brandon finds out, he’ll cancel the contract.”
“We’ll have to change their purpose,” Naomi said. “Find a lucrative problem for them to solve that doesn’t involve control over people’s lives.”
“You could go public. Tell the press what you have, look for backers. I bet Aisha would fund you, especially if you had a clear business plan. I have some cash, too, though most of my profits are being funneled right back into growing the business.”
“I don’t know about going public,” she said. “What if the government got involved? They could just take it over, classify it, use the Mikes for weapons targeting or hacking foreign governments. All kinds of doomsday scenarios come out of that one.”
“Think about it,” Tyler said. “You can’t just keep going as you are. Something has to change. Or it’s going to be your body they find on the road.”
It was late, but Naomi headed back to the office anyway. She wanted to start right away on the software to disconnect the Mikes from the real cars, and she could make faster progress at the office than she could at home. She took the elevator to the fiftieth floor and stepped out into the poorly lit hallway. She worked her key in the lock, opened the door, stepped into the dark office, and reached around to flip on the light.
The light revealed Brandon, sitting in the chair behind his desk, glowering at her like an angry father catching his daughter home past curfew.
“You scared me half to death!” Naomi said. “What are you doing sitting here in the dark?”
He lurched to his feet, and she could tell he’d been drinking. “What are you doing sneaking around behind my back?”
“Sneaking? What are you talking about?” She crossed to her desk, sat down, and powered up her machine. She was afraid of him, but she didn’t want to show it. Besides, the time with Tyler had made her feel braver. Brandon didn’t own her. He didn’t get to say what she did.
“I followed you,” he said. “I thought you might go to the police. I never thought you would go to him.” He spat out the word like it was poison.
“You mean Tyler? Can’t you even say his name?”
Brandon came around his desk and advanced on her. “He’s the enemy, Naomi. He works against us every chance he gets. He killed Abby. And you’re talking to him?”
“He didn’t kill Abby.”
“You’re sleeping with him, aren’t you?” Brandon planted his fists on her desk and loomed over her, his face mottled with drink and rage. “What else are you doing? Selling him our trade secrets?”
“You’re drunk,” she said. “I have to spy on you to know what’s happening in my own company, but you tell him everything.”
“It’s not like that.”
“I’ve given you a lot of rope,” he said. “Maybe enough to hang us both. The police keep calling, and I’m tempted to turn you over to them.” His eyes grew wide at a sudden thought. “You didn’t tell him about Min-seo, did you?” She tried not to react, but he saw it on her face anyway. His mouth contorted, and his voice raised to a shout. “You told him? Are you trying to ruin us?”
“I’m just trying to figure it out.”
“Because I’m not taking the fall for you,” he said. “Not anymore.” He came around the side of her desk, blocking her exit, and she started to think this was a mistake. She should have run for the elevator as soon as she saw him. “Min-seo is on you, not me,” he said. “It was all you. You’re the one who hated her, I don’t know why. You’re the one who writes the software. You’re the one who killed her.”
She stood, scrambling back from his advance. “Get away from me.”
“The police came to my house today,” he said, pushing her chair aside and stepping closer. “Did you know that? They had questions. Lots of questions. They wanted to examine our cars. I told them to get a warrant, and then they really started to push. If someone goes to prison for this, it’s not going to be me!”
He had her backed against the wall, her escape blocked by the filing cabinet on her right and Brandon closing on her left. She could smell the whiskey on his breath.
“We’ll figure it out,” she said.
“Figure it out? By betraying me to your lover? He took everything from me. Now he wants my business, too?”
She tried to sneak past, but he grabbed her and shoved her against the wall. He pressed his body up against her, one hand pinioning her wrist, his other arm against her throat. He breathed into her face. “Do you know how hard it is to come here and see you, day after day, looking just like her? It’s agony.” His breath was hot and foul-smelling, the force on her wrist painful. “Do you know what I would give just to have her in my arms again? To feel her warm body, loving and alive?”
“Let me go, Brandon.”
“You’re all that I have left of her. Just a shadow, just a poor reflection of what she was, but I’ll take it. That’s what I’ve learned from life. Playing by the rules gets you nothing. When you want something, you just go ahead and take it.”
She struggled to get away, but he was too big, too strong. He shifted both hands to her throat and held her tight against the wall. She flailed about, first pushing uselessly against him, and then reaching around for some kind of weapon. Her hand closed around the handle of the claw hammer still sitting on top of the filing cabinet.
Without hesitation, she swung it, connecting the round end with the top of his head. Her angle was awkward, but it was enough to make him howl and send him stumbling backwards, tripping over the chair and falling into a tangled heap. She scrambled over the desk and ran toward the door, but he was up and after her in an instant. She turned and swung the hammer again, and this time she connected with his temple, just short of his eye. He roared and spun away. She flung the door open and ran through toward the elevator, which opened at a touch of the button, still waiting on the fiftieth floor since her arrival.
“You’re done here!” Brandon shouted. “You’re through!”
She lunged through the elevator doors and punched the button madly, watching the hallway with the hammer raised, but Brandon never emerged. The doors closed and the elevator began its descent. She doubled over, clutching her stomach and leaning against the elevator wall.
When the doors opened on the ground floor, she stumbled out, her heart thundering in her chest. She knew Brand
on couldn’t have descended fifty floors as fast as the elevator, but she still expected to find him right behind her. She pushed through the lobby doors and out into the New York night, cool and dank, with the distant sound of automobile horns.
A Black Knight car idled at the curb, waiting for her. The same car that had brought her, in fact, as if the Mikes had known she wouldn’t be in the office for long. She ignored it, running along the sidewalk until she could round a corner, out of sight of the building. She called for a taxi instead, and let a person drive her home. She didn’t realize until she closed and locked her apartment door that she still had the claw hammer clutched in her hand.
CHAPTER 23
In the safety of her apartment, Naomi pulled on her glasses and logged on to the cloud with her company account. She had to hurry. Brandon could revoke her access at any time, and then she wouldn’t be able to do anything. One thing she knew: she was never going back to that office again. Which meant it was only a matter of time before he canceled all her accounts.
There was no way she could copy the Mikes onto another server. For one thing, it would take weeks to transfer that much data, and for another, she didn’t come close to having that much money. Tyler’s company had money, of course, and he would probably help, but copying large amounts of data to a competitor’s system was theft, and she had no doubt Brandon would prosecute.
Besides, could you copy a sapient mind? Would it still be the same if she copied it? If she made a copy of her own mind and put it in a clone’s body, the clone wouldn’t be her—it would be
24 6
a different person. It would start with the same memories, but it would be more like a twin, with its own thoughts and experiences, deviating quickly from hers. If such a thing were even possible. The other possibility was that the clone wouldn’t be sapient at all.
She was right back to the question of trying to define consciousness. How could she preserve it if she didn’t know what it was? Or if the Mikes even had it? At root, consciousness was a perspective. It was knowing you were in a story. If a being could tell a narrative of how things seemed from its perspective, then it was self-aware, conscious, sapient. She could imagine anything having that quality—for instance, she could tell a story about what it was like to be a rock. But that rock wasn’t actually sapient unless it had a point of view for itself.