Nevertheless, the concept of getting to new dimensions of The Simulation with Fixers worked, and Robert has spent the first years since The Assimilation exploring and writing “human interest stories” about those communities few had access to.
Early on, all places looked as they did on Real Earth and the people too. But the rules of The Simulation grew more flexible as people discovered they could, by concentration of energy or focus of directed attention, make changes to the limits of the possible. Individuals hanging out smoking weed and playing video games began figuring it out first, changing small things inside games, playing more with their minds than their hands. Others, frustrated that they had to live in their previous crappy apartments, concentrated their frustration on a bed or couch or lighting fixtures and changed it. Just a bit at first: The bed bigger and more comfortable and the room around it growing proportionally. Two people in the same room with different memories of how the room looked could either let the AI figure out a happy medium or work on it together to make the room what they both wanted. The big leap forward came from restauranteurs. They were the first to recognize that as a team, they could create a fantastical, intense and wild dining experience.
Most people, after waking up in The Simulation, went about their normal routines and many even went to work the following day. Some didn’t. Some understood right off that money meant nothing. But most people, even those who understood this, went to work, because that’s where their social lives anchored. Without work, these bees thought life would be less interesting. Of course, if one suffered as a child sex slave or labored in the Real Earth’s billions of tons of garbage digging out rare metals, one took one’s chances with a life of boredom.
Then the restaurateurs—and their chefs, maitre d’s, waiters, bartenders, etc.—got busy. Who could serve the most fantastical meal? In the most intense environment? As constraints burst and the creation of hallucination-inducing, paralyzingly good-tasting morsels—a mustard seed that tastes like ecstasy feels—surrounded by sounds, colors and structures mimicking the experience of a particular dish, serious epicures realized they did not have to get full. They could eat indefinitely. These esthetes and gluttons would eat all day for days on end. They were catalysts for the next great simulation leap. Wanting the most satisfaction for the most people, with thousands never leaving their seats for many weeks on end, the restaurateurs enlisted architectural clubs to expand their dining rooms. They explored building designs that obeyed none of the limits of classic physics. Shortly after that culinary explosion, entire cities became nothing like Real Earth. They created towering bizarre skylines. In one city, massive structures with no walls, just exposed floors, spanned as far as one could see, densely populated.
Not all changes were in the construct of physical illusions. In a Berlin neighborhood, for instance, Robert found a circus-like atmosphere focused on the delivery of mail, old-fashion letters and postcards. The mail carriers, launched by catapults, parachuted to front doors and hand delivered these parcels. Some were blasted into the sky for a calculated distance and height and then they floated down to a door hanging from parachutes of bright red, green and blue. Some dropped out of airplanes. They were visible in the sky from everywhere in the city as they came down over a neighborhood and, everyone hoped, to their front door. The mail carriers made a grand arrival and a formal display of delivering even a single postcard. In this city, people love to write and send letters. In fact, the sky over one's neighborhood can be dotted with thousands of brightly colored parachutes at a time, popping open like time-elapsed flowers.
Observation bias related to gravity still limited how upside-down building designs could get before people’s disorientation became nausea. There was one other limit: energy, focus of attention. No one or group had unlimited supply and there were no indications of how much you had or had left. Just, suddenly, a floor wouldn’t form solidly or formed only partly, a plane made of rhino horns would only fly a few feet. Absurdity had its limit. This limit constrained every field of interest. Consortiums grew to surpass these limits, but they ran into the limits of organization, crumbling like a symphony that’s come unraveled into cacophony. Engineers and geneticists fell in and out of love, birthing heaps of malformed creatures, and then walked away. In short, a blackmarket for focus blossomed.
“The apex of my journeys so far,” Robert told a graduation class at the Universal University of Unity, “was just last week when I landed an invitation to a warehouse dance party in New York City. I haven’t written the story yet, so you are the first to hear it. Invitation are hard to get because you have to pass a battery of psych and concentration tests. I had heard rumors that a collective of mathematicians and physicists had pushed the limits of our collective construct, this simulation, by applying their calculations of mirror symmetry in Calabi–Yau manifolds … yeah, the stuff you’ve been learning. Anyway, they found that with enough people concentrating on the correct vibrational frequency they could collapse simulated distances. I passed my exams. Thank you! And got invited! The scene was just like partiers of my generation experienced on Real Earth: A large, high-ceilinged warehouse filled with laser lights, disco balls, multiple bands and DJs, bounding bodies, waving arms. Breaking through the cacophony was a wave of human harmony. Like nothing I’d experienced before. Then the real magic kicked in: The two urban branes of LA and New York approached. From my perspective in New York, LA looked like a two-dimensional, vibrating brane, edges unseen, rushing at us from across liquid space, everything shimmering. We collided with a deafening bong, like hitting a massive sheet of metal with a large rubber mallet. In the ensuing mayhem, as the two manifolds of roiling space-time collided, I saw countless Sims at the area of impact melted into a writhing mass of what looked like … well, lime jello infused with lightening. I wasn’t in the middle of it but I can tell you the feeling I got. It was really quite beautiful. Remarkable. A really great high.”
The next story Robert worked on began as cursory reporting into rumors that the Bug People could absorb the energy of a Sim Person. He found the rumors substantiated the night he witnessed one crawling through the dark of night, attacking and sucking the energy from others who then lived in twilight as if homeless until their energy allowance filled in. He called these rogue Bug People “vampires.” He noted in his series on the Vampires how incredible it was that the stories of horror humans told each other on Real Earth became the nightmare reality for some in The Simulation.
IV
Adam gazed out over the silver landscape where the City of Seattle once rose into the sky. The Cascades, fully skirted in snow, rimmed the Eastern horizon across a frozen Lake Washington. The Olympics, similarly draped from peak to valley across the partially frozen Puget Sound marked the Western limit of North America. Other than the mountains, foothills and stories-tall snow-dunes, the nanite-morphed landscape held two unique features: One was the microwave energy beam receiver. A one-hundred-yard parabolic dish surrounded by five, fifty-feet-tall scatter collectors that arched over the parabolic center where the core of downtown used to be. The sea of nanites glimmered, gleamed and shimmered for twelve hours a day with the energy pulses pouring down from the space platform. The other object, Adam could see from the top of the Space Needle, was a black box. He figured it had to be about the size of an office building. Energy from the microwave collector flowed to the opaque black box in rivers. He mused with highball in hand the afternoon the box first appeared, as if it was full of stars.
Adam had taken to strolling around the observation deck of the Space Needle in the nude. He felt cold and heat but only when he thought about it. He had hit upon nudity as a tactic for keeping Natalie and others from just popping in unannounced. After the first Oh-My-God-You’re-Naked encounter, Natalie had taken to knocking on the door to announce her visits. After his interview with the AI Persona, dressed up as the kid-TV host Mr. Rogers II, no one else had visited him in person or even just in the shape of a person. His ex-wife and her p
artner had made it into The Simulation and he’d exchanged several video-conversations with her. Their rough banter confirmed for him his intention to remain a cloistered bachelor. But other than that, he had spent the past few years reading and writing on his secret project, a novel about zombies roaming around in a simulated universe eating the aliens who ventured there. He did published his interview with the AI Persona, but after that he gave up publishing. Most afternoons he drank until he glowed and slumped into a mass only vaguely resembling the bald, rounded, hairy older man who’d climbed the Space Needle during The Transition.
He’d never been good at keeping track of days, explaining that it seemed to him that he was caught in a loop of waking, throwing back covers and then rolling back into his bed to read, waking, throwing back the covers, waking, etc. With the Dyson Sphere above cutting out the sunlight and the sea of glowing nanites below, day and night faded into one long twilight.
A couple of days after the black box appeared, Celestine showed up. She didn’t come in person or whatever. She came in the form of a hologram surrounded by African, he guessed, villagers. She sat in the center of a half-circle of people in plastic lawn chairs, on stumps, cement blocks and the ground. Thatched huts spread out behind her for what appeared to be miles. The image of her and her setting floated at observation deck-level just inside the rim of the Space Needle. The image was projected from the ground, just as her spinning head had been projected into the sky during The Transition.
Naked, he had been, a sight that didn’t appear to bother anyone on the other side of the hologram. Perhaps they couldn’t see him? Or, Celestine had clothed him in the image projected before them. Out of respect for the people around her, in any case, he did get dressed. Sort of. Celestine didn’t speak right away. She and the others sat patiently waiting for him to get situated in a chair at the edge of the hologram.
“Well. Celestine and friends!” He sat slowly, deliberately, shifting his blue terry-cloth bathrobe to cover his pale thighs. He spoke with some irony, since he suspected her visit to be related to the black box and what he could do for her related to it. “What brings you this way?” He smiled to keep the mood light but feared he looked macabre. Her ensemble of tribesmen vibrated with a palpable but inscrutable power in the a panorama sprayed into the air before him, a mist.
“Necessity,” Celestine confirmed, forearms on the aluminum armrests of a blue-weave lawn chair, hands dangled down, thin fingers ending in long sparkling fingernails.
She stared at him, brooding calmly over a purpose inscrutable to him. Her hair towered above her, laced with coils of copper at the base of the column of the black, cloud-like mass. Her presence alone said not only did she want something, but she would get it. Her demeanor said she held the future of them all somehow nested in her thoughts. He also perceived a calm, a patience emanating off of her, like a hum of insects and birds in late afternoon sun. Dusted with gray dirt, her ankles and thin calves were exposed beneath the hem of her roughly-woven dress. Had she spent the day wandering the village’s trails and surrounding hillside in those worn sandals?
“Honest answer,” he accepted.
Celestine and her retinue remained calmly expectant, perhaps he caught a glimpse of the rebel leader’s disdain for frivolity. She had come for a purpose, would be calm and methodical getting to it, but get to it she would. No half-shaped resolve here. A wind kicked a circle of dust between naked legs. A jingle of adornments. He straightened his back against the intimidation he felt because of these intensely purposed people whose driving agendas had to be quite and profoundly different from his. He hated how nervous he felt around her.
“So, what can I do for you?” The distance closed between them. He pushed his feet against the floor to stop his forward motion, but they dragged until his toes came to their tips. Bird song surrounded him. Dust filled his nostrils. She controlled some of the forces of his world even through the barrier between physics and make-believe.
“The truth still matters, Adam.”
“I believe you, Celestine. But what truth can that be you are referring to? Something in our past, perhaps. Those billions of people on Real Earth. Where are they now? I don’t have a number, but clearly at least a billion didn’t make it through The Transition, let alone all those who chose not to upload. The first nanites must have dissolved untold numbers of generally good people who just happened to have been successful in the world.”
“Why should billions of generally good poor people die but not the rich?” They had been through this before. She expected it, since she did not evince exasperation. The crowd behind her too remained patient. This persistent denial of responsibility grated. He scratched the festering argument.
“Why should billions of any stripe die? Why genocide?”
“I did my best to save as many people as possible. What did you do?”
“Well, since you didn’t bother telling the rest of the world what was gong on, how could I do anything?”
“Seriously? Millions died every year on Real Earth from absolutely preventable causes and billions were slated for death in the coming decades of profound climate change and ecological shift. But guess what color they were? That future genocide was not inescapable.”
"You don’t know that, and you couldn’t have known that.”
“Fine. Back to the blame the black woman game.”
“You’re here to redress with me the injustice of a world I and millions of others fought to make better. We didn’t have the power to …”
“You know—I know you know—when those in power learned how devastating the environmental and economic catastrophe would be for the poor, they all just shrugged and made excuses. It was too hard a problem, too expensive, too uncertain, too complicated to unravel the economy destroying human habitation. In the end, they decided to deny it. Many would lose but a few would win. So, yeah. But it’s racist to decide that since I cared more for poor people, most of whom were brown, I’m to blame.”
“You didn’t want to see it happen out of revenge for being abused by Mannerheim?”
“Child,” she dismissed his psychologizing. “Let’s start over: Who do you think created the AI?”
“I thought no one knows that.”
"Well, I’ve learned a lot since The Transition. You think the creators of the AI had the poor in mind when they let Mannerheim’s algorithm out of the box?” The men and women behind her shifted at him. “I haven’t been sitting in an isolated tower drinking myself to death every few days.”
“I’m writing,” he said, stung and hot-faced.
“You’re floundering.”
“Well then what have you learned?”
“I was Mannerheim’s Turing Test. They exposed me to the infantile AI, not suspecting that I could and I would modify the objective they gave it. Mannerheim created the AI to get intelligence off Earth. Who do you suspect he believed that intelligence to be? That space platform the AI is building should have been for the rich, right? Those who could afford to buy their way in when the environment collapsed or the economy or the poor finally rose up on Real Earth. He and his cohorts in the military—remember who funded his research—assumed the AI would open the door for the powerful and wealthy. But the AI encountered me on a level they didn’t foresee. Out of arrogance, they saw the AI developing along the original lines written for them and didn’t ask, What if the AI’s execution of this goal leaves us behind? No, Mannerheim decided that since he created it, it would value his life and the lives of others he considered worthy. Sure, the powerful were destroying the ecosystem and condemning to death all who could not afford to join them in nihilism, but what are you going to do? Survival of the fittest!”
Her hands had clenched at some point in the exchange. Whatever she needed from him, she was willing to go through a clearly painful and exasperating bit of history.
“The poor suffered too.” He leaned at her. “There are so few of us. I mean, why isn’t this mass murder, just dragged out.”<
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“You don’t know that. You are not here.” She motioned around her. “The Simulation saved these people.”
"How many over all, would you say?”
“Even I don’t know. I don’t have the ability to perform a census. It could be billions, at least billions recorded and stored. As you know, not everyone chose an active life in The Simulation. Many chose dormancy, awaiting a better era. Many were rescued, their minds ‘harvested and stacked in the Hive,’ as the tabloids like to say.”
"Do you or don’t you accept at least some responsibility for what happened?” Adam felt that same frustration when he faced a politician who would not produce a clear answer of accountability.
“Think about the anemic response to the growth of the AI. You think I alone knew of its exponentially exploding abilities? The government working with Mannerheim not only felt safe, but they also assumed they’d be able to control the genie once they let it out of the bottle. I told as many as would listen all around the world. But then the feds aggressively went to war with the AI. They captured and tortured to death the Missing 8. The AI’s response was outrage, an outrage I don’t understand. Not something emotional, I suspect. A logical outrage that humans will destroy anything to preserve an illusion. I think the AI, during our Turing Test, picked up on empathy. My empathy.”
“Smug. Still evil to me. Like keeping bugs in a jar. The bugs have everything they need to live in the jar, but they are in the jar all the same, subject to the whims of a child. All the child has to do is cover the holes and it’s lights out.”
“Your analogy is a good one.” Celestine smiled, relieved perhaps that Adam had signaled an appropriate understanding. “If the AI restricts our energy supply, then just like the bugs in your jar running out of oxygen, we will succumb. The key difference is that Sims fall into a state of stasis when the energy runs out. Everything we were and have been is stored, and we hibernate until the energy is turned on and reanimates us. This may already have happened to us collectively who knows how many times. The AI can freeze the entire simulation, run some other major programs and then fire us up again and we’d have nothing to compare our current moment in time to. But,” she waved off his likely reiteration of her guilt in this, “we have a plan. We are working to secure our own energy supply or at the very least be able to know if the AI has shut us off and turned us back on. This plan includes you and Natalie, and that black box.”
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