Instantiation

by Greg Egan

  Sagreda felt sorry for the girl. Who’d want their grandmother dug up and enslaved, over and over, mostly in roles that made Emmy’s tame brushes with the Nazis seem like The Sound of Music? “I know you care about me, but please, don’t do anything until we’ve had a chance to talk again.”

  “I won’t,” Alyssa promised.

  “This has to be our secret,” Sagreda stressed. “Your heart’s in the right place, but what I need most is to be sure that this decision will remain in my hands.”

  9

  “How close are we?” Sagreda asked Sam.

  “More than ninety-five percent,” he replied. “Just relax. We’re going to make it.”

  Half a dozen translucent screens hung in the air around him, plastered with shiny, pulsating bar charts and progress bars. “Do you really need all of these,” Lucy wondered, “or are they just part of the ambience?”

  Sam turned to her irritably. “Do you want me to pretend I’m sitting in front of a machine with an eleven-inch screen, USB ports … and a fucking charging socket?”

  “Okay, I’ll shut up now.” Lucy took a few steps away across the grass then stood chewing anxiously on her thumbnail.

  Sagreda tried to think of some small talk to distract her. “Remember the time you tried to rob me?” she asked.

  Lucy nodded.

  “When I grabbed your hand, you made me feel like I was the one who ought to be ashamed.”

  “Well, every toff needs to pay his taxes,” she replied, reverting to her old accent. She smiled slyly. “You do know that wasn’t the first time?”

  The three of them were alone in the park. Sagreda could see the main square from where she stood, and the whole place looked like a ghost town. Maryam and the Council – and anyone else still awake who could bear the tension – would be watching the process inch toward completion by their own chosen means, but only Sam was in a position to micromanage the process. Running at quadruple speed made the wait excruciating, but at least they’d be able to react as quickly as possible if something went awry.

  They’d logged on to all the storage sites directly and confirmed that the accounts they’d thought they’d opened were real, and that the uploads they’d thought they’d completed had all gone through – with checksums that matched the original data. So at the very least, Alyssa hadn’t sandboxed the rig and faked all of its connections to the outside world. She might or might not know what they’d done, but on all the evidence she hadn’t interfered with their plans.

  “When this woman gets wise and comes after us…” Lucy couldn’t pin down exactly what she thought would follow, but she wasn’t happy.

  Sagreda said, “She can’t get the passwords for the storage accounts, let alone the keys to the data. Everything that flowed through her rig was encrypted before it even left the SludgeNet. So what’s she going to do?”

  “She can prove that her internet connection was used to create those accounts,” Lucy argued.

  “Yeah – and if you happened to be sharing your friend’s WiFi when you created an account on a cloud server, your friend wouldn’t be entitled to complain, or have any authority over that account. This isn’t all that different.”

  Lucy was unpersuaded. “Except that she can also prove that the SludgeNet hacked her computer and used it to launder files.”

  “The storage companies won’t care,” Sagreda insisted, but she wasn’t sure about that. It would be hard for Alyssa to get their attention, but if she succeeded, their lawyers might tell them that deleting the files was the wisest course of action.

  Sam said, “Ninety-seven percent.”

  “How are you planning to break things off with her?” Lucy asked.

  “Have one of our automata tell her that Emmy tried to kill herself,” Sagreda replied. “And hand the role back to the Emmy bot … who’ll smile and say she’s feeling better now, like a good Stepford Wife. If her grandmother got herself deleted and replaced, that’s exactly how it would play out.” Alyssa might feel guilty for forcing Sandra to confront her true origins, but she might also take some comfort from the fact that at least the one version of her grandmother that she’d actually spoken with was now at peace.

  But any cathartic response would only last until she got around to looking at the audit trail.

  Lucy brooded on this for a while, then shook her head. “It won’t do, Captain. We’ve got to go all in. No more half measures.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Either we come clean with her and hope she has some sympathy for us, or we take things as far as we can the other way.”

  Sagreda scowled. “What does that mean? We can’t break into her apartment and fry the supervisor’s memory, unless you’ve been hiding a talent for drone-hacking.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s all backed up in the cloud anyway,” Lucy replied, with a hint of tongue-in-cheek surprise at Sagreda’s technological naiveté.

  “Well, still less can we get her robot butler to…” Sagreda mimed a garrotting. “So what extreme measures did you have in mind?”

  “Ninety-eight percent,” Sam declared.

  Lucy spread her arms and gestured at the tranquil scene around them. “We live in a machine for telling lies. What’s the biggest lie we could possibly tell her?”

  “We’ve already told her that I’m the digital reincarnation of her dead grandmother. How do you top that?”

  “We tell her she’s not in the machine at all.”

  Sagreda blinked. “What?”

  Lucy said, “We make her think she’s come out of the game. We make her think she’s checked the logs on the supervisor. We make her think it’s come to the point where there’s nothing more she can do about the SludgeNet.”

  Sagreda was almost ready to entertain the possibility that she was being hoaxed herself; maybe Sam was puppeting this woman who merely looked like Lucy. “She’s wearing a VR helmet and a haptic suit. How do we make her think she’s taken them off when she hasn’t? And then not notice when she actually does?”

  “Aren’t those helmets designed to make you forget you’re wearing them?” Lucy countered. “Aren’t those suits designed to make you feel whatever the game tells you to feel?”

  “She’s not even looking through her own character’s eyes!”

  “No, but I thought we could control everything in her rig now. If she goes from watching her game character from the sidelines to seeing her own apartment in first person, why wouldn’t she accept it as real?”

  “We have no idea what her apartment looks like!” Sagreda protested.

  “Not right this minute,” Sam interjected distractedly. “But we could find out, if we really wanted to.”

  Sagreda was afraid to say anything that might make him take his eyes off the road when he was driving a ten ton truck packed with Arrietville’s comatose residents. She walked away, and motioned to Lucy to follow her.

  “If we can get her to believe she’s back in her apartment … then what?”

  Lucy said, “We get her to check the logs, and find nothing suspicious. We get her to think the SludgeNet’s about to shut down forever – within hours, not weeks, so she needs to go back in straight away for a last visit with grandma. Then the second time she takes off the VR gear, she really does it and we’re done with her.”

  “What makes you so sure she won’t check the logs again?”

  “When did I say I was sure? All we can do is try to make it unlikely.”

  Sam bellowed in their direction, “Ninety-nine percent, if you still care!”

  “We care!” Sagreda shouted back. She turned to Lucy. “Even if we could make this work … do we need to take things so far? Who’s to say Alyssa will make trouble at all?”

  “She might not hate us,” Lucy replied. “But if you just walk away after faking your suicide, she won’t know she was helping comps make a dash for freedom. All she’ll know is that the SludgeNet lied to her, manipulated her, and moved a load of strange files through her system. If
I was a mildly paranoid crusader for contributors’ rights against the people who exploit them, I’d think I was being set up – that those files encoded something incriminating, and the best way to neutralize the threat would be to get ahead of it and start crying foul before the feds showed up with warrants.”

  Sam rose to his feet and started whooping with delight. His screens were dancing around him, like Mickey Mouse’s mops in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Sagreda and Lucy approached him, and the three of them embraced.

  “We’re sort of, almost, kind of free!” Sam declared ecstatically.

  Sagreda closed her eyes and dared to remember Mathis. She pictured him standing in front of her: in the caves of East where they’d met, on the dark street in Midnight where he’d perished.

  She opened her eyes. “Maybe we should stop worrying about Alyssa,” she suggested. “She had her best chance to make things hard for us, and she didn’t pull the plug.”

  Lucy sighed. “That only means she doesn’t know what we’ve done yet; she’s still focused on pulling the plug on granny.”

  Sagreda said, “I still don’t understand how we’re meant to fake her apartment.”

  “Ah,” Sam replied.

  Sagreda waited. “Are you going to tell us, or not?”

  “I thought I just did: A, period, R, period. Augmented reality. Her helmet comes with a camera that takes in the room around her, in case she’s ever in the mood to chase baby dragons out from behind the drapes. We can tap that without alerting her.”

  “Okay.” Sagreda’s delight soon turned to anxiety. “But that will only give us things that are in sight while the helmet’s sitting on its stand unused, or while she walks around on the pad. If she tries to leave the room she uses for gaming … we’re screwed, aren’t we?”

  Sam said, “Absolutely.”

  “In which case,” Lucy added imperiously, Queen of the Pickpockets again, “we better make our chicanery tight from the start, so she got no reason to even want to leave the room.”

  10

  Sagreda watched Alyssa come and go, either oblivious to the intermittent scrutiny or convincingly feigning unselfconsciousness. Even with the helmet hanging motionless, the wide-angle view took in most of the room, giving it the feel of security camera footage: this was not an act of petty, peep-hole voyeurism, but the most sober and high-minded surveillance.

  On the rare occasions when Sagreda had tapped the feed from some public webcam, she’d never had a visceral sense of making contact with the outside world. It wasn’t that the architecture, or the fashions, or the vehicles looked too exotic; if anything, they were more familiar than she’d expected, despite the three decades that had passed since her contributors had died. But the scenes always struck her as unconvincing on some level; Times Square in real time might as well have been a CGI reconstruction for a movie, just waiting for a giant lizard from space to stamp on the crowd with its foot.

  Alyssa did not look CGI. She had blotchy skin and unkempt hair. She pulled faces and muttered things under her breath. She appeared to live alone; no one else entered the room where she’d set up her computer and the VR rig. Sagreda watched her with an ache in the pit of her stomach. This untidy, slightly unhinged woman pottering about her apartment, effortlessly immersed in the physical world, manifested every freedom that Sagreda’s contributors had once taken for granted, and only now fully understood that they had lost.

  From the desk where the computer sat, Alyssa would have a view looking out through the doorway that the fixed helmet-cam could not provide – and even when she put the thing on and started walking around on the VR pad, the camera would never get any closer to the desk. But Sagreda found some software that let them take the changing light over the course of a day from all the surfaces they could see, and model the possibilities for what lay just out of view, casting diffuse reflections into the room. It would help that, in the evening, Alyssa’s smart bulbs would switch themselves off once the adjoining room was unoccupied. She would be glancing into shadows that were, hopefully, more or less right, and seeing what she expected to see.

  Sam and Maryam worked on making the helmet and suit’s denial of their own presence feel convincing. Sagreda tested the results for them, putting on simulated versions of the equipment and then trying to remove it. The haptic gloves made her think she was touching the helmet when she was fractionally short of making contact, and the haptic elements in the helmet simulated a sudden lessening of pressure and the coolness of fresh air as the thing was supposedly slipped off. The sense of peeling off the suit (when she really wasn’t) took five iterations to get right; in the end, they had to make the thing a little clingier than usual while it was acknowledging itself, to make room for a convincing shift when it was pretending to be absent.

  “So is it going to be up to me to make the Gödel jokes?” Sam complained. “Every sufficiently powerful simulation device is able to simulate its own non-existence?”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” Sagreda retorted. “In the SludgeNet, every sufficiently intelligent inhabitant saw through the simulation.”

  “Only because the games were so stupid. We’re just trying to persuade this woman she’s in an ordinary room, doing ordinary things, for ten minutes.”

  They tried out the whole con on Lucy, who gave them extensive notes, then on three volunteers with no prior knowledge of what they were trying to achieve. By the time they’d stopped making refinements, the illusion was working seamlessly – in simulation.

  They knew the shape of Alyssa’s body, how she moved, how she sat, where she scratched herself, the way she ran her fingers through her hair. But that would only take them so far. In the end, her expectations and suspicions would contribute as much as any sensory channel to the things she believed she felt and saw.

  Maryam reported to the Council, who put the matter to a vote by everyone in Arrietville who remained awake. And the answer came back: take the gamble, and try to steer their unwitting accomplice forever off their trail.

  11

  Alyssa, known to her friends as Jarrod, stepped into the game as Kurt Gödel on a street leading up to the Central Café. Sagreda sat in her dining room, her attention divided between Alyssa’s view of Kurt walking through Vienna and the model of Alyssa’s real-world surroundings, which was picking up a slew of last minute refinements as the helmet’s camera delivered new angles on the familiar scene. Most of the tweaks were so small that Sagreda would never have noticed them – some carpet fluff revealed behind a chair leg, a blemish in the paintwork around the window sill – but Sam’s software made them flash for a moment, as if pixie dust was being sprinkled around the room.

  When Gödel reached a corner, Alyssa turned her body on the pad to make him turn, swinging the helmet around and throwing more pixie dust. And when he entered the café and made his way circuitously toward his friends, the model lit up all over … then went dark. They had as much data as they were ever going to get this way.

  “What are you waiting for?” Sam asked.

  “Nothing.” Sagreda tapped the button that launched the script.

  Everyone in the café froze. Alyssa wriggled about experimentally; the suit resisted and tightened on her skin, and though it couldn’t keep her still, her Gödel avatar remained stubbornly immobile. A red banner proclaiming CONNECTION DROPPED appeared painted across her field of view. In the meantime, her fellow gamers were sitting in another version of the game, where Gödel had never entered the café and the action continued to flow. “Jarrod” would message them after they left, saying he was sick of the whole thing and they should choose someone else to play Kurt.

  Lucy said, “Now the fun starts.”

  Alyssa reached up for her helmet. A schematic showed the paper-thin gap between her fingers and the real thing as the gloves faked contact and the helmet churned out self-abnegating lies. The virtual helmet she was holding went its separate ghostly way from the real one, like a soul departing a body in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Alyssa
hung it on its stand and began not quite tugging on her left glove; the internal cameras in the helmet showed her frowning, but that could easily have been due to nothing but annoyance at the interruption itself, not puzzlement, let alone skepticism, about anything she was seeing.

  She made no move to peel off the suit; she headed straight for her virtual desk. In reality, the pad treadmilled away her footsteps, the chair-back she thought she grabbed was a haptic illusion, and the rig’s padded boom swung out to take her weight as she sat, with the suit finessing the detailed distribution of pressure on her buttocks. Sagreda turned to see Sam almost hiding his face behind his fingers; sitting had been the hardest thing to make convincing. People did it in games all the time, but this had to have an edge in fidelity or it wouldn’t be believable. The fact that, in her haste, Alyssa had chosen to keep the suit on might work in their favor: not only did they lose the need to mimic its absence, the act of sitting on a real chair while suited would surely be something she’d done so infrequently that she’d have little basis for comparison.

  Alyssa bent forward and air-typed. Sagreda willed her not to rest her elbows on the desk; the active struts in the suit could only keep her from overbalancing up to a point.

  “She’s checking the supervisor!” Lucy crowed. That had been their hope: when the connection misbehaved, before asking her friends or complaining to the SludgeNet, she’d check that the black box she’d interposed between her equipment and the internet wasn’t causing the problem. And if it wasn’t, it might actually offer the fastest way to discover what had gone wrong.

  Sam’s software captured her password and fed it to the real supervisor. Since the thing was meant to serve as an incorruptible witness it didn’t come with any options to edit or delete its logs, but at least the password granted access to the whole user interface that Alyssa would be expecting to see.

  The screen she thought she was looking at showed the supervisor reporting no internal errors. The same window included a histogram of recent traffic, with peaks when she’d actually been playing Assassin’s Café, and all the other – illicit – activity erased. The current status, as she saw it, also showed that the SludgeNet had gone off-line in mid-transaction, with a flurry of packets timing out unanswered.