Being Arcadia

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Being Arcadia Page 13

by Simon Chesterman


  “It looks like you might need to cure that cut first,” Moira suggests.

  Dr. Bell says nothing, turning on his heel to leave the room once more.

  “I’m developing a new theory,” Moira observes calmly, “about the nature of reality. I’ve concluded that it’s more likely than not that all of this”—she gestures at the cage, the corridor beyond, the lights—“is, in fact, a computer simulation, part of an elaborate video game.”

  Dr. Bell has been gone for a few minutes, presumably dressing his wound. Is this some coping mechanism that her sister is developing, to deny the peril they face? “You mean at the end of this we wake up and it’s all been a dream?”

  “No, I mean that the dream is all there is. It’s an ancient idea. The Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu famously dreamed he was a butterfly, but on waking up struggled to work out if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamed he was a butterfly—or a butterfly now dreaming that it was Chuang Tzu.”

  Moira taps the bottom of her coffee to drain the last of the espresso. “Two thousand years ago, that was a nice thought experiment. Today, look at how quickly video games have moved from parallel lines knocking a circle back and forth across a screen, to augmented reality games that involve millions of people simultaneously chasing after Japanese mutant pets. If we assume any kind of continued improvement, eventually virtual reality will be indistinguishable from reality itself. And once that happens, you’re down the rabbit hole.”

  “It sounds like you’ve watched The Matrix a few times too many,” she replies. Surely they should spend what energy they have trying to escape the madman who holds them captive.

  “With my lifespan, I tend not to watch full-length movies more than once,” Moira says, now ripping the paper cup apart to lick the remaining traces of coffee. “I don’t mean that we’re imprisoned in the game—just that we can’t know whether we are in it or not. So if it is inevitable that virtual reality is going to reach that point, it starts to become more likely than not that what we think is real is actually a simulation.”

  She has finished her own coffee and sets the cup down beside her, shifting her legs slightly as they are beginning to go numb from sitting for so long. “Why would anyone spend time and energy making such a pointless game, with such boring outcomes for the vast majority of people?”

  “Maybe not everyone’s playing. Maybe it’s just you.” Moira pauses, ominously: “Maybe everyone else is watching the game, to see if you can work that out.” The other her looks up at the ceiling, where a small camera is observing them. “Good morning!” she calls out. “And in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!” Discarding the coffee cup, her sister takes another swig of electrolytes and leans back against the wall of her cage. “Or maybe I’m just blowing smoke.”

  They sit quietly for a full minute, the rushing water of the river and an occasional murmur from one of the macaques the only sound.

  “I am sorry that you’re dying,” she says at last.

  “There’s nothing to apologise for,” Moira responds. “You come from nothing; you’re going back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing! I live life faster than most, anyway. At my back I always hear time’s wingèd chariot, hurrying near, and all that.” Moira stretches her arms. “Whatever you do, don’t call me brave. Why is it that people think that the terminally ill are more noble than everyone else? Surely we’ve got more of a reason to be more callow, more craven, more angry at the world than those with time on their side.”

  The other her examines her fingernails absently. “You know, Arky, that’s one thing I do like about your brother. He has the right attitude: life is uncertain—start with dessert. What’s the point of ploughing through your vegetables in the hope of getting to the pudding when you might choke on a carrot stick? I always eat dessert first.”

  The sound of the wooden door opening alerts them to the return of Dr. Bell. A sticking plaster has been hastily applied to his cheek and he strives to appear unflustered. “Now,” he says briskly. “Where were we?”

  “Arky’s destiny, you curing death, yada yada yada,” Moira offers with a yawn.

  Dr. Bell chooses to overlook the sarcasm.

  “If you’re looking at how to prolong life,” she says. “Why not start with Moira? Save her, give her a few more years in the sun.”

  Still fussing with his iPad, Dr. Bell shakes his head. “You suffer from the same limited imagination as everyone else. It’s not a question of prolonging life but removing death. People invest billions in ageing, but they focus on the body. Eat well, exercise, tighten the skin, lower the cholesterol, replace an organ here and there. With billions more investment, we might be able to extend life to a hundred and twenty, maybe even a hundred and fifty years. But what sort of life? It all ends the same way: decay. Entropy takes over. Ashes to ashes.”

  “Funk to funky,” Moira adds drily. “We know Major Tom’s a junkie.”

  “Oh very droll, Moira,” Dr. Bell says wanly. “The bottom line is that the body, that biology itself, is finite. A tortoise might live for two hundred years, but that’s about it for organisms more complex than a jellyfish. The design flaw is with evolution itself. Evolution rewards those who live long enough to pass on their genes—what happens after that is irrelevant.

  “But what is a person, anyway. Their body? When someone dies, that’s what we deal with. We bury it, we burn it, we leave it out on a rooftop for vultures to consume. Yet it’s not what we miss. It’s the mind that we mourn. Human religions seek out ways for the soul to live beyond the body, returning to earth through reincarnation or ascending to a heavenly paradise.”

  “In your case, I wouldn’t exclude some red hot pokers waiting down in the fiery pits of hell,” the other her says airily.

  “You of all people should know better than to lecture about theology,” Dr. Bell snaps. “Science was held back by religion for centuries because of a fear of knowledge. Adam was right to eat the apple and Eve was right to give it to him.”

  “That would make you the snake, then?” Moira inquires archly.

  “A role I would happily embrace!” Dr. Bell says adamantly. “To liberate humanity from the shackles of our ignorance. But people forget that there were two trees in the Garden of Eden. One was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The other was the tree of life. Today I’m more interested in the second of those.”

  “It’s also possible,” Moira observes, “that there were no trees at all and the whole story is based on a bad Latin pun: that mãlum, or ‘apple’, rhymes with malum, meaning ‘evil’.”

  “So what if there was a way for the mind to outlive the body?” Dr. Bell continues, ignoring Moira. “Because information, information doesn’t die. And what is the mind, at root? Information. Electrical impulses racing around a neural network. People used to think that consciousness required some divine spark to give it meaning, but now we know that it just arises from the way in which billions of neurons communicate with one another. Like the music on an old vinyl record, it gets scratched the more you play it. Copy it onto a digital format, however, and it can be kept intact forever.”

  “You want to upload yourself into a computer?” More pieces of the jigsaw fit themselves into place. “That’s why you broke into Magnus’s work,” she says to Moira. “And you,” she turns back to Dr. Bell, “you are X?”

  “Ironic, isn’t it”—he smiles again without mirth—“how helpful your brother has been since he joined my research team. The ravens come home to roost, so to speak.” He looks at them expectantly, perhaps hoping for laughter. “No? Oh I thought that was rather good, myself. I do wonder if Magnus will be disappointed, though, when he finds out that I chose you to play the starring role, instead of him?”

  “But he told me about Project Raven,” she says. “We’re a decade from being able to create a computer as complex as the human brain.”

  “It may be considerably longer than that. But the path is already set. So many people fret abo
ut climate change and nuclear war—it’s the wrong set of problems. Humans won’t become extinct, like the dinosaur and the dodo. With the rise of computers and artificial intelligence, we will simply become obsolete.

  “Think about it. The world is already dominated by information. What we experience online is often more ‘real’ than any fact we bother to check. People talk about the Internet of Things, with more and more devices being connected. Again, they miss the point: soon there will no longer be things separate from the Internet.”

  “But our experience of the world is much more than just the rattling of electrons in our heads,” she says. “It’s our relationship with others, our connection to that world. Our hormones. You might be able to take a digital picture of neural activity and even model it, but that’s not the same as it being alive, as having feelings.”

  “Nonsense. More than a hundred years ago Thomas Huxley showed that what we think of as conscious feelings are just by-products of physical processes. We convince ourselves that pain makes us wince, that the appearance of a loved one makes us smile. But actually the facial expressions precede our so-called feelings. What we call consciousness is just the steam-whistle on a locomotive: it might be caused by the engine within, but it has no impact on the train itself.”

  It is a strange metaphor, but she pursues it. “And yet even if all that’s true—that we’re all just trains pootling along, tooting our whistles—those whistles still have an impact on all the other trains.”

  “As I said, it was a nineteenth century view of consciousness. In a decade or two, maybe three, the biological notion of existence will go the way of the steam train: a quaint reminder of an inefficient past.”

  “So what’s your rush now?”

  “I fear that my own body is starting to give in,” he says wearily. “I take care of myself, of course, but statistics are against me avoiding heart disease, dementia, and so on for another ten years. My body is unlikely to last for thirty more.” Then force returns to his voice: “I, for one, don’t plan on leaving the world just because a set of chemical reactions has run its course.”

  “You said yourself that we don’t yet have computers sophisticated enough to carry all the information from a brain. Project Raven is close to being able to copy the brain but there’s nowhere to store that much data.”

  “Ah Magnus.” Dr. Bell shakes his head. “So brilliant and yet so lazy. Always looking for the simplest solution to the problem, instead of the more arduous task of looking for a simpler problem. That’s where you come in.”

  “Me?” she asks warily.

  “Isn’t that why parents have children in the first place, to seek a kind of immortality?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We should really have some dramatic music,” Moira interjects, leaning forward against her cage door. “Elevate the tension and so on.”

  “I’m saying,” Dr. Bell replies, “that Magnus has ignored the answer that stares him in the face every day. If you can copy the brain, you don’t need a machine on which to store it. You just need another brain, preferably a genetically compatible brain—that of your daughter, for example.”

  10

  CRISIS

  “You’re going to put your mind into my body? That’s insane.”

  “Madness is indeed a possible outcome,” Moira observes thoughtfully from her cage. “Whole brain emulation typically assumes putting a copy of the brain onto a blank medium. Writing over an existing mind runs the risk of corruption of data and loss of identity.”

  “You knew about this?” She turns to her sister, but her movements are sluggish, the numbness in her legs having spread through her body.

  Moira returns her gaze. “Not at first. But remember that I did try to protect you from this battle.”

  “By framing me for theft.”

  “For the Crown Jewels—you would have been famous!”

  Dr. Bell claps his hands together. “Well,” he says, “this is all very entertaining, but I suppose I had best get on with the procedure. The muscle relaxant in your coffee should have taken effect by now.” He takes a key from his pocket and unlocks her cage door.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to try writing yourself onto my brain, doc?” Moira calls out. “There’s room enough here for both of us.”

  “No thank you, Moira,” he replies, pocketing his key. “Once Natalia—or perhaps Octavia or Portia—has achieved stability then a brain such as yours would indeed be an upgrade. Yet I suspect it would need to be wiped clean prior to emulation to avoid my consciousness being overwhelmed by yours.”

  “Coward,” Moira mutters. He ignores her and swings the cage door open.

  Arcadia tries to stand but only succeeds in falling into Dr. Bell’s arms. “It’s a curious feeling, I know,” he says, holding her under the armpits as her legs drag on the ground. “Your mind is clear, but your body is unable to respond. For the process to work I need you to be conscious.” His breath coming in short gasps, he half-carries her down the row of cages towards the padded chairs. Moira and a line of macaques look on.

  “From the tests that I’ve done,” he adds, putting her in one chair and fastening the restraints, “I gather the process is somewhat distressing and quite painful. But at least it should be relatively brief.” He lifts the helmet and begins attaching small metal discs connected to cords within it to different parts of her skull.

  Despite herself, she finds the process fascinating. “It’s like an EEG?”

  He pauses. “More like a reverse electroencephalogram,” he says, placing the last electrode and standing back to admire his work. “The device reads my brain activity and then in real time emulates that activity in your brain by forcing a similar pattern on your neural network. When complete, it is I who will be looking out of your eyes.” He sits down in the second chair and begins attaching electrodes to his own head.

  “And will I swap into your body?” she asks—immediately regretting it, because the answer is clear.

  He laughs as if the question is a foolish one, which it is. “Why on earth would I do that? No, this is a process of copying. I will also remain in this body—as a backup, if you like.”

  “Two heads are better than one, eh doc?” Moira calls out.

  “… if what you’re looking for is a concussion,” she finishes softly, remembering something the other her said on their first meeting. Then looking back to Dr. Bell, she asks: “So what will happen to me?”

  “Hmm?” he replies absently, positioning the helmet on his own head and adjusting settings on the iPad. “Nothing at all. Your body should be unharmed but you will simply cease to be. You won’t die as such, you just won’t be you. I will be you.”

  She digests this for a moment as he busies himself with the device. “You are a coward,” she says at last.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You didn’t give up Magnus and me to maintain scientific detachment. You did it because you’re a self-obsessed narcissist. And because you didn’t want to risk developing an emotional attachment that would prevent you following through on the murder of your own child.”

  “Arcadia, having actually met you, I can assure you that I don’t think an emotional attachment was ever a likely scenario.”

  “So what’s your next step. Snatch my body and then go back to university? Get a job? Then take another body when this one starts to develop wear and tear?”

  “Basically, yes.” He taps the iPad and a low hum fills the room. “You will recall that I successfully encouraged you to apply to Magdalen. I’m pleased to advise that you will be offered a place that I will gladly accept. Originally, I had thought this process might wait until you were at least eighteen and your brain fully matured, but circumstances require that I accelerate matters.” He returns his attention to the iPad.

  “Wait, wait,” Moira calls from her cage. “Doesn’t she get any last words? Arky, I suggest something cool, like ‘Yippee-ki-yay, mother—’”

  “
That’s quite enough from you, Moira,” Dr. Bell snaps.

  “You need to think about these things,” Moira grumbles. “You wouldn’t believe the number of young men who die with the last words: ‘Hey guys, watch this!’”

  “I said, enough!” Dr. Bell shouts. “I don’t have time for this sentimentality.” He enters a final set of instructions into the iPad and then leans back in his chair.

  “Just remember, Arky,” Moira calls out. “Switch camels.”

  Switch camels? The thought is pushed out of her head by a wave of nausea, dizziness that would have caused her to stumble if she were not already seated. The electrodes now feel hot against her scalp, the helmet stuffy. The air she breathes in still reeks of faeces, but there is something else. A flower.

  Jasmine, Edith’s favourite. The scent becomes overpowering, cloying in its intensity. I am surrounded by jasmine, and now before my eyes the row of cages transforms into a row of trees, the macaques no longer imprisoned but swinging from branch to branch, calling to one another, effortlessly gliding through the canopy. The grace of their movements belies the peril that they flee. On the ground we follow them in jeeps and on motorcycles, a new urgency to their vocalisations as they guess at our purpose. Above us, one lags behind, a mid-sized male with a tuft of white hair. It has been chasing after straggling infants but is now itself vulnerable. Beside me, a guide raises a blowpipe to his lips and fires a dart. The monkey screams, unable to keep its grip, and tumbles to the ground.

  Yet when it hits, the sound is not of a body landing on grass but a gavel striking a table. An Institutional Review Board with sour-faced academics in gowns formalising their disapproval of my methods. Ethical violations, exposing the University to risk, cowards all—they would have foregone every breakthrough from Galileo to Darwin, telling them to keep their discoveries to themselves. I ignore them, of course. They will come crawling back, begging to take credit when I win the Nobel Prize.

 

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