by Vernor Vinge
"Sorry," grader Ellen said to NSA Ellen. "You’ve got the dollar."
"You could be right, Victor. But cognition is my–our–specialty. We two are something way beyond normal dreaming or hallucinations."
"Except that could be illusion, too," said Victor.
"Stuff it, Victor," said Dixie Mae. "If it’s all a dream, we might as well give up." She looked at Michael Lee. "What is the government up to?"
Michael shrugged. "The details are classified, but it’s just a post hoc survey. The isolation rules seem to be something that Professor Reich has worked out with my agency."
NSA Ellen flicked a glance at her double. The two had a brief and strange conversation, mostly half-completed words and phrases. Then NSA Ellen continued, "Mr. Renaissance Man Gerry Reich seems to be at the center of everything. He used some standard personality tests to pick out articulate, motivated people for the customer support job. I bet they do a very good job on their first day."
Yeah. Dixie Mae thought of Ulysse. And of herself.
NSA Ellen continued, "Gerry filtered out another group–graduate students in just the specialty for grading all his various exams and projects."
"We only worked on one exam," said grader Ellen. But she wasn’t objecting. There was an odd smile on her face, the look of someone who has cleverly figured out some very bad news.
"And then he got a bunch of government spooks and CS grads for this surveillance project that Michael and I are on."
Michael looked mystified. Victor looked vaguely sullen, his own theories lying trampled somewhere in the dust. "But," said Dixie Mae, "your surveillance group has been going for a month you say .
. ."
Victor: "And the graders do have phone contact with the outside!"
"I’ve been thinking about that," said grader Ellen. "I made three phone calls today. The third was after you and Dixie Mae showed up. That was voicemail to a friend of mine at MIT. I was cryptic, but I tried to say enough that my friend would raise hell if I disappeared. The others calls were–"
"Voicemail, too?" asked NSA Ellen.
"One was voicemail. The other call was to Bill Richardson. We had a nice chat about the party he’s having Saturday. But Bill–"
"Bill took Reich’s ‘job test’ along with the rest of us!"
"Right."
Where this was heading was worse than Victor’s dream theory. "S-so what has been done to us?" said Dixie Mae.
Michael’s eyes were wide, though he managed a tone of dry understatement: "Pardon a backward Han language specialist. You’re thinking we’re just personality uploads? I thought that was science fiction."
Both Ellens laughed. One said, "Oh, it is science fiction, and not just the latest Kywrack episode. The genre goes back almost a century."
The other: "There’s Sturgeon’s ‘Microcosmic God’."
The first: "That would be rich; Gerry beware then! But there’s also Pohl’s ‘Tunnel Under the World’."
"Cripes. We’re toast if that’s the scenario."
"Okay, but how about Varley’s ‘Overdrawn at the Memory Bank’?"
"How about Wilson’s Darwinia?"
"Or Moravec’s ‘Pigs in Cyberspace’?"
"Or Galouye’s Simulacron-3?"
"Or Vinge’s deathcubes?"
Now that the ‘twins’ were not in perfect synch, their words were a building, rapid-fire chorus, climaxing with:
"Brin’s ‘Stones of Significance’!"
"Or Kiln People!"
"No, it couldn’t be that." Abruptly they stopped, and nodded at each other. A little bit grimly, Dixie Mae thought. In all, the conversation was just as inscrutable as their earlier selfinterrupted spasms.
Fortunately, Victor was there to rescue pedestrian minds. "It doesn’t matter. The fact is, uploading is only sci-fi. It’s worse that faster-than-light travel. There’s not even a theoretical basis for uploads."
Each Ellen raised her left hand and made a faffling gesture. "Not exactly, Victor."
The token holder continued, "I’d say there is a theoretical basis for saying that uploads are theoretically possible." They gave a lopsided smile. "And guess who is responsible for that? Gerry Reich. Back in 2005, way before he was famous as a multi-threat genius, he had a couple of papers about upload mechanisms. The theory was borderline kookiness and even the simplest demo would take far more processing power than any supercomputer of the time."
"Just for a one-personality upload."
"So Gerry and his Reich Method were something of a laughingstock."
"After that, Gerry dropped the idea–just what you’d expect, considering the showman he is. But now he’s suddenly world-famous, successful in half a dozen different fields. I think something happened. Somebody solved his hardware problem for him."
Dixie Mae stared at her email. "Rob Lusk," she said, quietly.
"Yup," said grader Ellen. She explained about the mail.
Michael was unconvinced. "I don’t know, E-Ellen. Granted, we have an extraordinary miracle here–" gesturing at both of them, "–but speculating about cause seems to me a bit like a sparrow understanding the 405 Freeway."
"No," said Dixie Mae, and they all looked back her way. She felt so frightened and so angry–but of the two, angry was better: "Somebody has set us up! It started in those superclean restrooms in Olson Hall–"
"Olson Hall," said Michael. "You were there too? The lavs smelled like a hospital! I remember thinking that just as I went in, but–hey, the next thing I remember is being on the bus, coming up here."
Like a hospital. Dixie Mae felt rising panic. "M-maybe we’re all that’s left." She looked at the twins. "This uploading thing, does it kill the originals?"
It was kind of a showstopper question; for a moment everyone was silent. Then the token holder said, "I–don’t think so, but Gerry’s papers were mostly theoretical."
Dixie Mae beat down the panic; rage did have its uses. What can we know from here on the inside?
"So far we know more than thirty of us who took the Olson Hall exams and ended up here. If we were all murdered, that’d be hard to cover up. Let’s suppose we still have a life." Inspiration: "And maybe there are things we can figure! We have three of Reich’s experiments to compare. There are differences, and they tell us things." She looked at the twins. "You’ve already figured this out, haven’t you? The Ellen we met first is grading papers–just a one-day job, she’s told. But I’ll bet that every night, when they think they’re going home–Lusk or Reich or whoever is doing this just turns them off, and cycles them back to do some other ‘one-day’ job."
"Same with our customer support," said Victor, a grudging agreement.
"Almost. We had six days of product familiarization, and then our first day on the job. We were all so enthusiastic. You’re right, Ellen, on our first day we are great!" Poor Ulysse, poor me; we thought we were going somewhere with our lives. "I’ll bet we disappear tonight, too."
Grader Ellen was nodding. "Customer-support-in-a-box, restarted and restarted, so it’s always fresh."
"But there are still problems," said the other one. "Eventually, the lag in dates would tip you off."
"Maybe, or maybe the mail headers are automatically forged."
"But internal context could contradict–"
"Or maybe Gerry has solved the cognitive haze problem–" The two were off into their semi-private language.
Michael interrupted them. "Not everybody is recycled. The point of our net-tracking project is that we spend the entire summer studying just one hour of network traffic."
The twins smiled. "So you think," said the token holder. "Yes, in this building we’re not rebooted after every imaginary day. Instead, they run us the whole ‘summer’–minutes of computer time instead of seconds?–to analyze one hour of network traffic. And then they run us again, on a different hour. And so on and on."
Michael said, "I can’t imagine technology that powerful."
The token holder said, "Neither
can I really, but–"
Victor interrupted with, "Maybe this is the Darwinia scenario. You know: we’re just the toys of some superadvanced intelligence."
"No!" said Dixie Mae. "Not superadvanced. Customer support and net surveillance are valuable things in our own real world. Whoever’s doing this is just getting slave labor, run really, really fast."
Grader Ellen glowered. "And grading his exams for him! That’s the sort of thing that shows me it’s really Gerry behind this. He’s making chumps of all of us, and rerunning us before we catch on or get seriously bored."
NSA Ellen had the same expression, but a different complaint: "We have been seriously bored here."
Michael nodded. "Those from the government side are a patient lot; we’ve kept the graduate students in line. We can last three months. But it does ... rankle ... to learn that the reward for our patience is that we get to do it all over again. Damn. I’m sorry, Ellen."
"But now we know!" said Dixie Mae.
"And what good does it do you?" Victor laughed. "So you guessed this time. But at the end of the microsecond day, poof, it’s reboot time and everything you’ve learned is gone."
"Not this time." Dixie Mae looked away from him, down at her email. The cheap paper was crumpled and stained. A digital fake, but so are we. "I don’t think we’re the only people who’ve figured things out." She slid the printout across the table, toward grader Ellen. "You thought it meant Rob Lusk was in this building."
"Yeah, I did."
"Who’s Rob Lusk?" said Michael.
"A weirdo," NSA Ellen said absently. "Gerry’s best grad student." Both Ellens were staring at the email.
"The 0999 reference led Dixie Mae to my grading team. Then I pointed out the source address."
"[email protected]?"
"Yes. And that got us here."
"But there’s no Rob Lusk here," said NSA Ellen. "Huh! I like these fake mail headers."
"Yeah. They’re longer than the whole message body!"
Michael had stood to look over the Ellens’ shoulders. Now he reached between them to tap the message. "See there, in the middle of the second header? That looks like Pinyin with the tone marks written in-line."
"So what does it say?"
"Well, if it’s Mandarin, it would be the number ‘nine hundred and seventeen’."
Victor was leaning forward on his elbows. "That has to be coincidence. How could Lusting know just who we’d encounter?"
"Anybody know of a Building 0917?" said Dixie Mae.
"I don’t," said Michael. "We don’t go out of our building except to the pool and tennis courts."
The twins shook their heads. "I haven’t seen it ... and right now I don’t want to risk an intranet query."
Dixie Mae thought back to the Lotsa-Tech map that had been in the welcome-aboard brochures. "If there is such a place, it would be farther up the hill, maybe right at the top. I say we go up there."
"But–" said Victor.
"Don’t give me that garbage about waiting for the police, Victor, or about not being idiots. This isn’t Kansas anymore, and this email is the only clue we have."
"What should we tell the people here?" said Michael.
"Don’t tell them anything! We just sneak off. We want the operation here to go on normally, so Gerry or whoever doesn’t suspect."
The two Ellens looked at each other, a strange, sad expression on their faces. Suddenly they both started singing "Home on the Range," but with weird lyrics:
"Oh, give me a clone Of my own flesh and bone With–"
They paused and simultaneously blushed. "What a dirty mind that man Garrett had."
"Dirty but deep." NSA Ellen turned to Michael, and she seemed to blush even more. "Never mind, Michael. I think ... you and I should stay here.
"No, wait," said Dixie Mae. "Where we’re going we may have to convince someone that this crazy story is true. You Ellens are the best evidence we have."
The argument went round and round. At one point, Dixie Mae noticed with wonder that the two Ellens actually seemed to be arguing against each other.
"We don’t know enough to decide," Victor kept whining.
"We have to do something, Victor. We know what happens to you and me if we sit things out till closing time this afternoon."
In the end Michael did stay behind. He was more likely to be believed by his government teammates.
If the Ellens and Dixie Mae and Victor could bring back some real information, maybe the NSA group could do some good.
"We’ll be a network of people trying to break this wheel of time." Michael was trying to sound wryly amused, but once he said the words he was silent, and none of the others could think of anything better to say.
Up near the hilltop, there were not nearly as many buildings, and the ones that Dixie Mae saw were single story, as though they were just entrances to something under the hills. The trees were stunted and the grass yellower.
Victor had an explanation. "It’s the wind. You see this in lots of exposed land near the coast. Or maybe they just don’t water very much up here."
An Ellen–from behind, Dixie Mae couldn’t tell which one–said, "Either way, the fabrication is awesome."
Right. A fabrication. "That’s something I don’t understand," said Dixie Mae. "The best movie fx don’t come close to this. How can their computers be this good?"
"Well for one thing," said the other Ellen, "cheating is a lot easier when you’re also simulating the observers."
"Us."
"Yup. Everywhere you look, you see detail, but it’s always at the center of your focus. We humans don’t keep everything we’ve seen and everything we know all in mind at the same time. We have millions of years of evolution invested in ignoring almost everything, and conjuring sense out of nonsense."
Dixie Mae looked southward into the haze. It was all so real: the dry hot breeze, the glint of aircraft sliding down the sky toward LAX, the bulk of the Empire State Building looming up from the skyscrapers at the center of downtown.
"There are probably dozens of omissions and contradictions around us every second, but unless they’re brought together in our attention all at once we don’t notice them."
"Like the time discrepancy," said Dixie Mae.
"Right! In fact, the biggest problem with all our theories is not how we could be individually duped, but how the fraud could work with many communicating individuals all at once. That takes hardware beyond anything that exists, maybe a hundred liters of Bose condensate."
"Some kind of quantum computer breakthrough," said Victor.
Both Ellens turned to look at him, eyebrows raised.
"Hey, I’m a journalist. I read it in the Bruin science section."
The twins’ reply was something more than a monologue and less than a conversation:
"Well ... even so, you have a point. In fact, there were rumors this spring that Gerry had managed to scale Gershenfeld’s coffee cup coherence scheme."
"Yeah, how he had five hundred liters of Bose condensate at room temperature."
"But those stories started way after he had already become Mr. Renaissance Man. It doesn’t make sense."
We’re not the first people hijacked. "Maybe," said Dixie Mae, "maybe he started out with something simple, like a single superspeed human. Could Gerry run a single upload with the kind of supercomputers we have nowadays?"
"Well, that’s more conceivable than this ... oh. Okay, so an isolated genius was used to do a century or so of genius work on quantum computing. That sounds like the deathcube scenario. If it were me, after a hundred years of being screwed like that, I’d give Gerry one hell of a surprise."
"Yeah, like instead of a cure for cancer, he’d get airborne rabies targeted on the proteome of scumbag middle-aged male CS profs."
The twins sounded as bloody-minded as Dixie Mae.
They walked another couple of hundred yards. The lawn degenerated into islands of crabgrass in bare dirt. The breeze was a hot w
histling along the ridgeline. The twins stopped every few paces to look closely, now at the vegetation, now at a guide sign along the walkway. They were mumbling at each other about the details of what they were seeing, as if they were trying to detect inconsistencies:
"... really, really good. We agree on everything we see."
"Maybe Gerry is saving cycles, running us as cognitive subthreads off the same process."
"Ha! No wonder we’re still so much in synch."
Mumble, mumble. "There’s really a lot we can infer–"
"–once we accept the insane premise of all this."
There was still no "Building 0917," but what buildings they did see had lower and lower numbers:
0933, 0921... .
A loud group of people crossed their path just ahead. They were singing. They looked like programmers.
"Just be cool," an Ellen said softly. "That conga line is straight out of the LotsaTech employee motivation program. The programmers have onsite parties when they reach project milestones."
"More victims?" said Victor. "Or AIs?"
"They might be victims. But I’ll bet all the people we’ve seen along this path are just low-level scenery. There’s nothing in Reich’s theories that would make true AIs possible."
Dixie Mae watched the singers as they drifted down the hillside. This was the third time they had seen something-like-people on the walkway. "It doesn’t make sense, Ellen. We think we’re just–"
"Simulation processes."
"Yeah, simulation processes, inside some sort of super super-computer. But if that’s true, then whoever is behind this should be able to spy on us better than any Big Brother ever could in the real world. We should’ve been caught and rebooted the minute we began to get suspicious."
Both Ellens started to answer. They stopped, then interrupted each other again.
"Back to who’s-got-the-token," one said, holding up the dollar coin. "Dixie Mae, that is a mystery, but not as big as it seems. If Reich is using the sort of upload and simulation techniques I know about, then what goes on inside our minds can’t be interpreted directly.
Thoughts are just too idiosyncratic, too scattered. If we are simulations in a large quantum computer, even environment probes would be hard to run."