Biblical

by Christopher Galt

  Transhumanists and especially the Simulists, who have made a religion of science, believe that it is our destiny to create simulations of our world, of ourselves. This is based on the logic that it is an essential part of our natures to simulate – from Paleolithic cavepaintings to books, theater and movies to hyper-real computer games, simulating reality has been a huge part of our intellectual output throughout history. Even science uses highly sophisticated computer simulations to predict future events in our universe and recreate past ones. On a low-tech level, we create theme-parks, visitor attractions and historical re-enactments.

  But the Transhumanists and Simulists have gotten it wrong. We are not about to undergo the Singularity and create simulations of our past. We have been through the Singularity and this is the simulation. Or one of countless simulations running in some substrate reality by beings so advanced they can no longer be described as human. But however changed they are, however godlike, the basic human instinct to enquire, or curiosity, has endured and they built this simulation to resurrect their distant ancestors and see what life was like for them. And if you were some far-future posthuman, would it not be the immediately pre-Singularity experience that would fascinate most? That time of transition from humanity to posthumanity?

  This shouldn’t be news to you – many have speculated about it throughout history: from Plato, Zeno of Elea and Descartes to Moravec and Bostrom. The nineteenth-century Russian Cosmist Nikolai Fyodorov predicted that we would eventually build what he called a ‘prosthetic’ society with technologically synthesized life that would be indistinguishable from real life. A simulation. He predicted we would be technologically capable of resurrecting the dead and making them immortal. He even speculated that the masters of the prosthetic world might be benevolent enough to offer their synthetic people life after death – a second existence in some kind of eternal data storage. Maybe Heaven is in the Cloud, after all.

  You could take this to mean that you are the distant ancestor of these superhuman-posthumans. Sadly, even that is not true. You are a replica of an ancestor in a simulation of the past. You are a theme-park attraction.

  The civilization you live in is a replica. Ersatz. A history study.

  Allow me to explain …

  64

  JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN

  Macbeth realized he’d been reading for hours. On the other side of the windows, the sun was rising. Mora Ackerman lay on his couch, having slipped into sleep. He watched her, the gentle movement of her body as she breathed, and wondered if she truly dreamed within the sleep she seemed to sleep.

  He closed the laptop and sat for a long time, thinking about what he had read. Astor’s arguments were irrefutable, but they were also unverifiable. Like the religions he so reviled, he asked his reader to put his or her trust in a single, far-fetched text. Was there enough there to justify Macbeth planting a bomb and destroying the project to which he had devoted four years of his life?

  He thought of Casey, smashed and dead on a morgue slab in England. He thought of Bundy, the man he had just killed. He thought about the insanity of the visions the world had been tormented by and the chaos that had followed them. He thought back over a lifetime of depersonalization and derealization episodes where he had been utterly convinced of the falsity of his own existence and that of all around him.

  Yet still he could not quite bring himself to believe Astor’s paranoid fantasy. What I need, he thought with weary irony as he rose slowly from his desk chair, is a burning bush or pillar of smoke or whatever kind of theophany posthuman gods go in for.

  *

  The thought had hardly formed when his apartment was filled with dazzling sunlight. The room – the furniture, the walls, the floor – all began to fade, to become translucent. Even Mora’s sleeping form on the couch became indistinct and glassy.

  Macbeth again found himself suspended above a disappearing Copenhagen. But he could still feel the floor beneath him. He dropped to his hands and knees and scrabbled across his living room until he bumped his forehead against the coffee table he could no longer see. His hand fluttered desperately over the invisible surface until it closed around the strap of the rucksack. He held it before his face, ran his hands over its canvas surface. He could feel it, feel the bulk of its contents, but to his eyes his hands were empty.

  “It’s still there …” he told himself. “It’s still real. I know it is.”

  He looked down.

  “Oh, Jesus …”

  Beneath him, seen through the now invisible floors below him, the Earth crackled and boiled. He felt a wave of nausea surge up in his chest.

  He closed his eyes tight, forcing his reason out of its dark corner hiding and demanding it take control. He breathed slow and deep. The sounds of the false world around him tugged and shoved at his resolve, but he focused hard on closing everything down, retreating into the fortress of his own mind.

  “It’s not real,” he repeated. “It’s not real!”

  Macbeth remembered how Astor had written that the hallucinations were as real as normal experience, it was a matter of which reality you were tuned into. The words seemed to taunt Macbeth as he used every neuron in his brain, every fiber of being, to tune into the reality he chose. He remembered what he had told Casey about Cosmo Rossellius, about how you could rebuild a reality as a memory space in your head. That’s what he had to do. He had to use his memory and focus.

  He opened his eyes. Rising to his feet, he looked all around. He existed, he realized, in two realities. For as far as he could see in every direction, he was surrounded by an alien planet that continuously cracked and boiled and fumed beneath a churning, nauseous sky – but he was looking at it as if through rippling glass. He could see his apartment and everything in it, but only as glassy, transparent forms, more rippling edges and shapes than solid. Enough, perhaps, for him to navigate by.

  Macbeth realized that the other world he saw through the insubstantial glaze was one no human could survive in. It looked like every description he had ever read of Hell, but he knew that it wasn’t. This was Protoearth – the infant world just taking shape. The world before the Moon. Its mass, its rotation, its tilt, its dynamics – everything about this world was different. What he was looking into, through the window of his present, was a four-and-a-half-billion-year-distant past: a time before all of the coincidences and improbabilities that Astor had discussed had taken place to create a world capable of sustaining life long enough for it to evolve into complexity.

  Macbeth also knew exactly what caused Protoearth to give birth to the Moon: the Theia Impact. A planet the size of Mars would hit the Protoearth and release one hundred million times the energy of the impact that had wiped out the dinosaurs.

  That was what was going to happen. That was what the biggest – and final – hallucination was going to be. Gillman had been right: the beginning of the Earth was going to be the end of mankind.

  The slate was being wiped clean.

  Billions would die. Billions would stifle in the oxygenless atmosphere, would burn to death in the impossible heat, would be crushed by atmospheric and geologic forces – none of which would exist anywhere other than in their heads.

  He had to stop Project One.

  He looked again at the rucksack in his hands. He could see it, just, as if it had been carved out of ice and water.

  He had to get to the University.

  65

  JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN

  Every step he took was an exercise of the mind, as much as of the body. Macbeth had to constantly remind himself that he still inhabited the world he’d known. His apartment was still there, as was Copenhagen. Everything was all still there.

  He stood in the middle of his apartment. He had to convince himself of that fact: second by second, he had to reaffirm the reality in which he stood, shutting out the burning, churning world that stretched out below him. The more he focused, the clearer the edges of the room, the furniture, the building became; but
they never coalesced to anything more than translucent shapes.

  It took him an age to navigate the stairs, not trusting his eyes and finding each step with uncertain feet while gripping tight the near-invisible handrail. At one point, when he had just cleared the second landing, the ground two stories below him bubbled and a huge jet of magma surged up towards him. He closed his eyes just before the molten rock enveloped him.

  “It’s not real!” he yelled into the stairwell. “None of it is real!”

  He felt no heat, no impact. He opened his eyes again and found the crystal edges of the steps were that little bit clearer, the glass from which the apartment building seemed to be constructed slightly more opaque, dulling the volcanic fury of the imagined world around it.

  *

  It was tougher out on the street. At ground level, he felt completely immersed in the illusion. Again he had to focus, to concentrate, as if rebuilding reality in his mind millisecond by millisecond.

  Macbeth made his way through a landscape of churning crust and magma, beneath a sky of dense, bilious cloud, but he did so by following the soft-etched edges of the world he forced himself to believe he still inhabited. Larsens Plads appeared to him as a geometry of crystal, through which he could see the world glow, bubble and burst. He reached the Amalie Gardens: the crystal ghosts of the fountain, the carefully trimmed hedges and delicate flower beds superimposed on a writhing, belching world of fire and magma. He used the Amalienborg Palace, a huge, ornate ice sculpture in Hell, as a landmark to get his bearings. All the time he tried to concentrate his mind, to block out the tricks and deceptions it was playing on him. Copenhagen took form around him as glassy outlines in the lake of fire and magma. It was as if someone had overlaid one reality on another and Macbeth stayed focused on finding his way to the Institute.

  Every now and then he would stop, close his eyes again and will himself back into the reality of his own world. Each time he reopened his eyes, the crystal world became clearer, the tumult of the Protoearth a little less vivid.

  He reminded himself of his father’s words: Each mind is a universe unto itself: an independent cosmos of infinite complexity and inimitable uniqueness. Macbeth was determined to remain master of his own universe. He pushed on.

  He thought through what he was going to do. It was impossible for him to destroy Project One simply by smashing the hardware. Only he and Dalgaard knew that Project One’s off-site backup was stored at DIKU, the Computer Science Department on the Nørre Campus. He would have to destroy that too, but it could wait. If he could damage the on-site facilities enough, it would stop Project One functioning. Stop it thinking. Kill it.

  If he did that, and if the insanity that he found himself sharing with Gillman and Blackwell was justified, then this monstrous hallucination should stop.

  In every street he could see glass people in glass buildings and it reminded him again, vaguely, of some novel he had read once by a long-forgotten Russian author. Every insubstantial figure he saw was frozen, and he realized that the glass people who now inhabited his world were also Dreamers, each trapped in this vision of Hell, helpless and at the mercy of their deceived senses. Only he could help them. Only he could stop the hallucination.

  He made his way along what he knew must be Grønningen – the Kastellet Park was to his right and the trees appeared as frozen vaporous clouds, almost invisible against a volcanic spume. His progress was painfully slow: like a drunk man constantly having to steady himself, Macbeth repeatedly had to refocus his mind, concentrate on the shapes of the trees, the roadway, the buildings. Halfway along Grønningen he stopped abruptly. As if the insanity and confusion of navigating two superimposed worlds was not enough, he had suddenly become even more disoriented. For a second he had been sure that the park beside him was Boston Common. What new trick was this? It passed and he regained his bearings, pushing on.

  The sky above him lowered even darker and the clouds began to fizz and crackle with lightning. He didn’t have long.

  He reached Østerbrogade and the Lakes, but again he had to focus not just to keep the traced-out structure of his world clear while the primeval Earth groaned and spluttered lava high into the dark sky, but also to dispel the temporary belief that the insubstantial shimmer to his left was the Lakes and not the Charles River. What was happening to him?

  He became totally disoriented again when, for a moment, he thought he recognized the liquid-glass street he was in and the building that took insubstantial form ahead of him. But it couldn’t be. He could have sworn he was in Beacon Hill, looking at the glass ghost of Marjorie Glaiston’s house. He closed his eyes again, forcing focus once more. His mother. That was who Marjorie Glaiston had reminded him of. When he looked again he knew where he was, turned and headed along Blegdamsvej and towards the Niels Bohr Institute.

  All the consciousnesses in the world.

  Had he really lived the life he thought he had? Why was his autobiographical memory so bad? Was that the reason behind his quest to understand the nature of consciousness?

  If there is no world around us, we invent one.

  What had he invented? Was he inventing this? Was Astor right and all of this was only really happening in his own head?

  He ran through a landscape, an event, a time that could not be.

  The book. John Astor. Had he put the book there on his computer? Had he written it himself and forgotten it? Was he John Astor?

  There were people in the university building. Immobile, transparent, glass people dreaming their way into extinction. No one moved, no one challenged or tried to stop him. It had taken Macbeth over two hours to make a journey that would normally have taken him thirty minutes on foot.

  He found his way to where he knew the janitorial store to be and found a fire ax, looking absurdly fragile in its transparency.

  He was making his way up to the laboratory when the dark near-night, clearly visible through the filmy structure of the Institute, gave way to a new, sudden brightness. Macbeth looked up and saw it: the terrible, hypnotizing beauty of Theia in her final approach. She would soon smash into the Protoearth, ejecting into space billions of tons of debris that would coalesce and form the unlikely dual-planet system of Earth and Moon. The rare combination that would create deep oceans, plate tectonics, a liquid iron outer core to the Earth and a magneto-sphere to protect the planet from solar winds. The extremely rare conditions that would allow life not just to exist, but to persist and develop into advanced form.

  He had to destroy Project One. He had to kill the consciousness within it. End its dreaming. He was gripped with panic at the idea that his own mind was synthetic, created to understand a past that could not be relived. Maybe it was his consciousness in Project One. Maybe he was everyone who had experienced the visions. Maybe he was everyone and no one.

  If there is no world around us, we create one.

  Theia loomed huge, blocking out the sunlight but illuminating everything with its own thermal violence as the bigger Protoearth’s gravity ripped at it.

  “Too late!” Macbeth heard his own voice cry out. “It’s too late!” And with that the glassy-edged world became even less substantial. He dropped the ax and was surprised when it didn’t shatter. Instead it made the hard, metallic clang it should have, reassuring him of its invisible solidity.

  How can I stop this? he thought desperately. How can this ever be made right? Even if I destroy Project One, people won’t forget, they will remember this and they’ll know everything is false, a simulation. How can this ever be put right?

  I know the truth, he told himself. It can’t be put right as long as I know the truth.

  He closed his eyes again and thought of his father, of Casey. Of Melissa. Of Mora. When he opened them again he resolved not to look back at the sky and found the Institute had taken more shape again.

  Determined to shut out all else, he navigated the corridors to Project One. He went straight to the suite, feeling with his fingertips the buttons he could not se
e clearly enough on the entry pad. He pulled at the door but it didn’t yield: he had mis-keyed the code. There was a long, low, bellowing cry that shuddered through him and it took him a second to realize it was the Earth screaming as Theia pulled at her, bulging her surface. Cracking it open.

  He swung the ax at the door, at the keypad lock, over and over. Translucent wood splintered into slivers of glass. He slammed his shoulder to the door and it refused to yield. The glass ax arced through the air, Macbeth uttering an animal cry with each blow. Once more he slammed his shoulder into the door he could now barely see. This time it gave way. He was in.

  Again he felt the Earth shudder beneath his feet; lurch and moan in protest at Theia’s increasing pull.

  Don’t look up.

  He focused on the control room. Everything was still molded out of liquid glass and it was impossible to read anything on the ethereal monitor. There would be no deprogramming or erasure. Only complete, physical destruction of the computer and its backups would work. He made his way to the main body of the computer, a self-contained array of drives. Maybe, if he destroyed these first and the backups later … maybe that would do …

  All around, through the ghostly walls of the lab and the university, Macbeth saw giant spumes of magma arc up into the sky as the Earth embraced its approaching mate. He had only seconds.