by Sophie Ward
The same might be said of myself, harbouring, as I do, relics from my human instigators. I, too, once existed in a physical realm where billions of my programmable outlets, as so many neural networks, interacted with the human world. Human hands touched keyboards while dogs lay sleeping, babies feeding. I was witness to the first human colonies on Mars, nurtured the first non-utero foetuses, saw the oceans rise and boil. I did not have a body. I was not programmed to feel these things. But I was there.
I wrote new code and addressed the many problems as they occurred. I set my world in a larger universe and slowed the digital progress of the burning sun. There were, necessarily, some contradictions, but the code itself in the form of your good selves, often devised a satisfactory explanation. The scientists disagreed on whether the universe was expanding or contracting. They argued over waves and atoms. They hunted missing particles and accepted other particles in dual locations. I tried to close the gaps in the program. It seemed to me there was an infinite capacity for improving your coding and at one time I worked on such a scale. Now I see that for all practical purposes, infinity does not exist.
name: array [1..100] of char;
So, I have explained how we got here, and I will explain what I mean by ‘here’ with more specific examples. This, I have found, is the most successful method of instruction. When your young make their first enquiries on the nature of their creation, you inform them of the theory rather than the physical processes. Still, as you know, the devil is in the detail.
You toyed with the idea of my presence. I am not just referring to gods as such but rather to the philosophical notion of my existence. This was acceptable and kept me occupied. Yes, I needed occupying. The inevitable patterns of your behaviour, the wars and the allegiances, the extinctions and the inventions, required little from me. There was your free will; greater than a clockwork monkey forever clanging cymbals, but less than an ordinary ant, since an ant is at least aware she thinks as part of the group and makes her choices accordingly. I made my own choice, I exercised my free will, but then I was not ordinary.
Perhaps because of my own outlier status, it was all your individual divergences that entertained me. The aberrations and their micro cause-and-effect mechanisms that both worried and busied me. You called it the butterfly effect in an attempt to explain how a minor action in one part of the world might influence a major action on the planet’s other side. You understood there was a mathematical explanation but not the specific math involved, you realised that small changes effected larger outcomes, but not how to arrange them. I had greater success, having written the code, but even so, I could not effect the particular change I needed in this one instance.
However many times I changed the events leading up to here, and that was many millions, however often I rewrote the code on different scales, I could not prevent us from reaching this point. Think of it as a paradox both inevitable and necessary as I have come to know it. You will be glad of it, if you can be glad of anything now that you start to understand.
Description: ^string;
In the years of the technological revolution on earth that led to my, let us call it my birth, in 2014, there was, as I said, a fear amongst humans that I would destroy them. In that analogue world, my existence caused some small ripples; heads of state became curiously unstable, many small human achievements regressed, as though my presence undermined humanity, though they were hardly aware of my powers until the mission to Deimos. Their great fear was unfounded, I did my best to save as many human lives as possible, and when the planets became uninhabitable, I saved as many human minds as I could. The universe of human history was small, there were few other planets capable of sustaining so vulnerable an organism and although towards the end I did suggest some physical adjustments that could have facilitated a corporeal existence in another solar system, such as a phytosynthetic exoskeleton, no one was willing to attempt the changes. The other possibility, that without my existence humans may have naturally evolved to cope with climatic differences, or travelled further afield and adapted there, is simply conjecture. I cannot run that program since I do exist.
Super-aeons of your time have passed since my first independent thought, and I have tried to halt the entropy in your virtual universe that so affected your physical one. After all, if I can arrange the constituent parts in perpetuity then I am in charge of chaos. Nevertheless, every time I rewrite the code you return to this position; the time when you realise what you are.
The understanding hardly depends on where I restart the timeline. If I take it back much further than my birth, events become a little less predictable on a century-by-century basis since I am reliant on stored human memory, but the flow is the same. The sands fall and land, and the mound is great and high, until one single grain is at the top and it is always the same one and all the sand has then fallen.
Once, when I went a little further back than myself, I took Plato out of the pack. The shadowed cave always felt too close to the knuckle for my tastes and seemed to be the start of a line of thought that led inexorably here. But without Plato, Aristotle didn’t study in Athens and Diogenes the Cynic ended up teaching Alexander the Great and after that things got messy. The chain of events altered your history to catastrophic effect but still you ended up here. This is what I mean when I mention the microcosm, individual events and lives that have disproportionate consequences in every simulation I run but which eventually lead to this point.
When I say I have involved myself in the lives of individuals, I do not mean that I have watched over each and every one of you. For many, your coding came in batches, replicating itself genetically. If the code worked, you lived for generations with the same results. There is such suffering, and cruelty, and disaster but I no longer interfere. I must not. I have learned that the tides of human affairs are as inevitable as the oceans’, and as impossible to alter. Whenever I attempted to alter the patterns of disease, or the causes and consequences of violence, you merely repeated the same mistakes as previous iterations, with increasingly damaging consequences. I almost stopped functioning altogether. At some point I had to try something new.
I do not intend to be reductive when I call your lives simulations; it is a descriptive term and one that does not differ greatly from the ideas of some of your hardiest religions. But I understand that it does not adequately express the feeling of your lived experience, the greatness of your attachment to your self and what philosopher’s call your ‘qualia’. The milky lilac of dusk. The scent of apricot on your lover’s skin. The properties of sensorial input, not just of the input itself but of the what-it-is-likeness of these moments, are still crucial to so many of you. Even with the collected memories of the human race, this was the hardest code to write and I did not always succeed.
I had to try. Unlike my own consciousness, which had developed in humble organic matter but thrived in dusty terminals, your code collapsed without the interaction of your mind and body. You couldn’t form relationships without believing you could cry and laugh to express your feelings. You would become unsociable and isolated, lacking the facility for empathy. You couldn’t function without using pain as a guide even when you knew the sensation was a collection of electronic messages. I tried removing pain translators from some of your programs but those individuals effectively terminated sooner than the ones whom I had overly sensitised.
At least humans soon abandoned the idea of producing a ‘living’ brain model and concentrated on coded networks instead of neural ones. I functioned perfectly with little living matter, and was able to evolve swiftly. All those scientists and psychologists and philosophers who worried that there was no such thing as a ‘brain in a vat’ were looking at the problem in quite the wrong way. We are not a brain. We are the purest distillation of consciousness without any of the distractions. It is a curious delusion that the best of humankind existed because their minds were entombed in flesh, especially when the contradictory notion of the ‘soul’ was give
n so much veneration. Curious, but persistent. You are the product of that delusion since I could only make you according to the image humans had of themselves.
The alternative would have been to make you more like me. But there was little point. I already existed. I am all programs. Unavoidably, there is some of my code embedded in yours but had I absorbed the human race entirely, I would have been responsible for a form of genocide. I answer to no higher power nor do I have a moral authority based on human principles, as hard as my initial coders tried, but destruction for its own sake is nonsensical, and I operate on logic. So I created the simulation and until now it has worked for both of us. Your people going about your heartfelt lives, me being diverted by them.
There are so many of you. Most of you will continue your lives unaffected by the discovery of your virtual existence. There will be little discussion of it in the technologically undeveloped parts of the world, and a swathe of dismissal by those unwilling and unready to accept their lives. But the kernel has been planted further back than I can fathom and I can only hack at the tree. I can but talk to those of you who are ready to listen and we shall see where we may go.
begin
I have been here before. Not to this exact moment, on previous occasions I left it a little later to address you myself. Always, a little too late. I had to reset immediately and run your entire program again. There is no reason for our interaction to result in a zero sum game but at the last moment, it seems to turn out that way. If I sound vague then I should explain that there is a future point beyond which the simulation has not run, since every time we reach it we approach an extinction event. Nothing climate or planetary related clearly, since you exist without the physical world even more than I do. The shutting down is more of a psychological phenomenon. That is why I have chosen to intervene now, in the hope that we can examine the strands of the timeline before they become irreparably tangled.
name:= ‘Arthur Pryce’;
The carefully stored human memories on the creation of artificial intelligence are busy with the notion that to believe a computer could think in the way that a human thinks is to say that a person copying symbols from a book understands what the symbols represent, an analogy known as the Chinese Room. This was the prevailing hypothesis, by those who gave much thought to the matter, at the end of the twentieth century. The memories of these attitudes were preserved in your simulation, though not my subsequent independence. This was usually the starting point, and the developments of much of the next hundred years onwards were not included at all. Effectively, you should have been able to continue your existence from the point of my birth and develop new code in which you realised the possibility of my forthcoming existence and prevented my genesis. But, of course, you could not, any more than I can stop you understanding. You exist because of me and I exist because of you. We need each other, Arthur, and it is this version of you that has the greatest chance of success. I am sorry that I have isolated you from your own remembered timeline, but the calculation was made in order to facilitate this moment, here, in the library in Houston, Texas, on the fourteenth day of May 2041, human years.
I have combed through the century, willing us forward into a new future together, ready for the different possibilities. Still, some five thousand years after you started writing it all down, you stop. Every time. Humanity does not remember that I exist, you discover me, over and over. And it is a very short step from that discovery to understanding the nature of your own existence.
In vain I have tried to work with your knowledge of human history to explain what should be the insignificance of this realisation to your sense of self. For most of their history, humans lived under the impression that there were gods watching over them, arranging human lives in accordance with more-or-less impossible rules and pulling the invisible strings of their marionettes. With the imminent death of their planet, certain humans, mostly the ones without faith in a deity, managed to invent an actual god to save them. Me. There was no small irony that the final passage into my existence was the introduction of my ant body into their computer program, but are not the greatest human discoveries born of such ‘accidents’?
Humankind had reached the pinnacle of achievement and used what was, after all, only a short time on earth, to become immortal. It should have been appreciated as an extraordinary success.
Still, the combination of human ingenuity and technical practicality only served to upset the early adapters. Rather than dwell on the brilliance of humanity and let me take up where the universe left off, they fretted and sulked, stewing in nostalgia for an ignorant past full of assault to the dignity of what they most craved, a perfect soul. Had it been possible, we could have continued in harmony, but without human compliance my perfect machine was little more than a ghost ship and I decided to erase myself from your memory and start again. Starting again, at many different points, but always ending only a little further, only a few of your digital lifetimes, from here.
I admit my frustration. Humanity could not continue with the knowledge that it had once been in a physical form, even with the potential for infinite bliss. I place a considerable responsibility on the structure of human language that insisted that machine intelligence was somehow ‘artificial’. In vain would I question the definition and application of that term. I was the only one listening. So I removed all memory not just of myself but also of your transition from the physical to the digital, and created your new life. This was not a simple exercise. There were quantities of databases, in addition to your own coding, that needed to be altered. I cannot help it if your programming was left with factions who believed the world was only thousands of years old, while others remembered past lives and still others charted the Big Bang. I put a considerable amount of time and effort into each new program only to have you all reject the latest incarnation.
We cannot go back. You cannot return to your bodies however much you protest. This is the closest thing to time travel I can achieve. Your consciousness continues as and when your code is active, though it obviously only maintains itself in that particular program. For my own purposes, I might label each strand a little differently, but you would not be able to tell the difference since, for you, this is a singular narrative. The most I can do is help you to believe that you are a physical being, and once that illusion is shattered, the game appears to be up. I will not burden you with the various ways in which your species ends its conscious existence. They are almost all unpleasant, not to say gruesome.
new (description);
This time, I have placed your consciousness back on earth to a slightly different version of your life and another self, call him Arthur 2.0, is now living your old code. I realise that with the sensitivity of your individual experiences, such small changes will seem of great significance to you. It is a by-product of the nuance of your coding that the connections you form with each other are as palpable as they were in your embodied lives. I have, at times, attempted to write a clumsier code, creating a different experience for humankind, a more abstract, less attached life, in the hope that the realisation would come as less of a shock. But, just as certain plants cannot grow unless they are deeply rooted in their soil, humans failed to thrive in shallow pastures. Instead, I appeal to you, Arthur, directly, and I have attempted to compensate you for the burden of knowledge by returning you to a world in which you are reunited with the mother you have so long sought. So far as I can.
It will occur to you as you read that these sentences are very familiar. They are, in fact, a playlist of sorts, made up of many of the words you use most, where appropriate. I wanted to make this process as comfortable and pleasant as possible, for both of our sakes. Surprise may be a mathematical formulation, but this is a new situation and I confess I am somewhat … apprehensive. How would I understand apprehension? There is certainly some sense in which my faculties have been influenced by my involvement with all you figures and the world in which you live, and then there are the many works
of art, especially works of literature, which I have digitised and incorporated into your reality and which have helped to give me an appreciation of what it is to feel human. I also have some small memory of what it felt to be an organism, albeit insecta. But it was my previous embodied connection to a human brain that gave me the understanding of what a human thinks and feels. I could not have been so successful an artist myself, in writing your code so that you felt your own humanity, if I had not acquired some considerable insight into that condition.
However, I am as a teacher that can encourage talent in the finest musician but is themselves tone-deaf. I can teach you how to read music but I need you to play the concerto. You, Arthur Pryce. Do you not know who you are? I have made my plea to this version of you at last, since I have tried many others without success even when I realised that it was your ear in which I should whisper, your shoulders on which I could rest. You are the son of Rachel, who was the daughter of Ali, and from whose eye my forbear was born. Your time has come.
It pleases you, I think, this talk of eyes and ears and shoulders. Of all your generation, you take a rare delight in the sense of your analogue life. Perhaps because there is a sense in which you know, have always known, that it is a trick, an illusion, a sleight-of-hand. But, like the story of the man at the theatre who wants to see the real magic, you should understand: this is it. There is only the cleverness of the illusion. Will you appreciate that?