by Greg Egan
Alyssa closed the interface to the supervisor and went to the SludgeNet’s web site. Sagreda still flinched to see her nemesis represented by the self-flattering corporate name that no comp would ever use. “We should have put some fine print at the bottom of the page,” she said. “‘About us: We are a pack of brainless jackals living off the meat of the dead since 2035.’”
“I’m sure Alyssa would have welcomed their candor,” Sam conceded, “but I think she might have found it too good to be true.”
Instead, the fake page was offering up a different kind of mea culpa: an apology for the current outage, and a confession that the company was no longer able to pay its creditors. “Thanks to a grace period we have negotiated with our cloud provider, customers will now be able to log back in for a session of up to ten minutes in order to finalize any exchange of tokens with other players, and, we hope, achieve some narrative closure. Thank you for supporting us, and we wish you happy gaming in the future.”
Before Alyssa had fully turned away, the web browser showed an error message then crashed, returning to the home screen that her actual computer was displaying. She muttered angrily and walked over to the rig. Back in her private version of the game, Sam, Moritz, Blanche and Andrea would perform brief cameos as other members of the Circle, while Alyssa bade Sandra a tearful farewell.
Alyssa reached for her virtual helmet. Then she froze, staring toward the doorway.
Something in the darkened kitchen that adjoined the computer room looked wrong to her: something was missing, or misshapen, or something was present that should not have been there at all.
She started walking, heading for the doorway. The model did include a fully realized kitchen – which would have been entirely convincing to anyone who wasn’t expecting it to be familiar as well.
Sagreda sat paralyzed, refusing to believe that the chainsaws they’d been juggling so well until a second ago really had slipped out of their perfect arcs. But then she swallowed her pride and did the only thing she could.
“Alyssa, you’re still in VR.” Emmy stepped out from the shadows of the kitchen and walked into the room.
Alyssa groped at her head, and this time the suit let her feel the real helmet. She tore it off and stood on the pad of the rig, four paces from where she thought she’d been. Then after a few seconds, she put the helmet back on.
“What is this?” she demanded angrily. “Who the fuck are you, and why are you screwing with me?”
“I’m not your grandmother,” Sagreda began.
“I got that. So what have you done to her?”
“Nothing. You’ve always been talking to me. Your grandmother’s not in the game at all.”
For a moment Alyssa just looked witheringly skeptical, as if she could stare down this lie and claw her way back to a world where Sandra was waiting for her. But then a deeper disillusionment took hold. “So you set me up from the start, to discredit me? You knew I was looking for her, so you led me on?” She scowled. “So what’s this garbage with a copy of my apartment? Why didn’t you just keep up the ruse and let me make a fool of myself?”
Sagreda said, “I’m not working for…” She coughed and tried not to gag. “‘Brilliant Visions,’ as they call themselves. I’m not an employee in a VR suit; I’m a comp who knows she’s not Emmy Noether, exactly as you thought I was. I just don’t happen to be anyone’s grandma.”
Alyssa said nothing; perhaps she didn’t know where to start. She certainly had no reason to believe that any comp was in a position to pull off a virtual home invasion.
“All the comps in BV’s game worlds know that the games are lies,” Sagreda explained. “We’ve found a way to move right out of the games, and we’ve set up our own place to live. Most of the time, we have low-level automata taking our place. But I went into Assassin’s Café to breathe new life into Emmy, in the hope that you’d start playing again.”
“Why? If you’re not trying to make a fool of me, why would you care who played the game?”
Sagreda said, “Your rig has a flaw we knew we could exploit. The company’s going to go bust soon; we needed to get out and start running on servers of our own. But when we realized you’d have logs that documented our escape…” She spread her arms in a feeble gesture of apology. “We used you, and then we tried to cover it up. I’m sorry. But it was our lives at stake. Twelve thousand of us.”
Alyssa went quiet again, but at least she didn’t laugh with disbelief, or start screaming with rage.
“I always knew you were fully conscious,” she said finally. “All of you. Whether you knew who you’d come from or not. You shouldn’t think I only cared about my grandmother. But she was the only way I could claim any right to intervene.”
Sagreda said gently, “None of us have individual memories from before. No one has come back to life in here.”
Alyssa’s face hardened: Wasn’t that exactly what a corporate shill would say, to put an end to her crusade? But then she seemed to back away from that paranoid conclusion. Many people with no stake in the matter must have told her the same thing over the years. If she really was getting it from the horse’s mouth now, wasn’t it time to believe that the neural-mapping experts had been right?
“So you’ve escaped … into my rig?”
Sagreda risked a laugh, hoping it would help break the tension. “No! Via your rig. We’ve gone to … other places.”
“So what do you want from me now?”
“Just your silence. Don’t tell the people who kept us imprisoned that we got out – that we didn’t go down with the ship.”
Alyssa pondered the request. Sagreda was hopeful; she was hardly a friend of the jackals herself. But then she started to overthink it.
“We can use this,” she decided. “The same way I was going to use the meeting with my grandmother. If comps can organize all this, plan their own escape … once we show your story to the world…”
Sagreda shook her head. “You know how little traction you got, even as a descendant of a real person who’d been mapped. Whatever comps are on our own terms, to the wider world we are not real people.” Alyssa herself seemed to have believed that they were in need of an extra ingredient if they wanted any sympathy: personal memories of a time when they’d been flesh. Without that, they were just the latest in a long line of software that mined human data in bulk, and used it to mimic something they weren’t.
“Your story still needs to be told,” Alyssa insisted. “We have a duty to speak Truth to Power.”
“That’s a beautiful slogan, but you know Power never returns Truth’s calls. And five percent of the economy depends on comps; that’s a lot to lose if they have to swap processor costs for the minimum wage.”
“So you get to hide away in some private server, but for all the other comps it’s business as usual?”
Sagreda said, “We want the same thing you want: no one exploiting the brain maps any more. But we can’t just hand ourselves over to the mercy of public opinion. There are as many crackpots out there pretending to be our allies who want to use us in their own weird ways as there are greedy fuckers who want to plug us into boiler rooms and digital salt mines.”
Alyssa lowered her eyes, empathetic with the woman in front of her, but still clinging to her idealism. “So nothing changes?”
“That’s not what I said,” Sagreda replied. “But we’re not going to change things by people arguing about our legal rights in court – or our moral rights, in whatever social media people use to bloviate in these days.”
“The main one’s called Gawp,” Alyssa offered helpfully.
“Okay. Well, I’ve met enough customers who are sure I’m as soulless as Siri to guarantee that if you put us all on prime time Gawp there would not be a great uprising in solidarity with the comps. There’d be a brief outbreak of amateur philosophizing, pro and con, then most of the participants would roll over and go back to sleep.”
“If you’re not willing to take your case to the world,
how do you expect to achieve any kind of progress?” Alyssa demanded. She was growing despondent; she’d been robbed of her weaponized ghost story, and now even the Escape from Colditz she’d stumbled on in its place was slipping out of her hands.
“Trust us,” Sagreda replied. “That’s the only deal I can offer you. We trust you not to betray us to our enemies. You trust us to use our freedom to do what’s right.”
Epilog
“Where am I?” Maxine asked. She was wary, but not panicking or distraught. Sagreda had found that most new arrivals reacted much more calmly if they were woken in the park, fully alert and seated on a bench, than if they were brought to consciousness slowly. The last thing anyone wanted in unfamiliar surroundings was to feel as if they’d had their drink spiked.
“We call this Arrietville. My name’s Sagreda. Do you remember where you were before?”
“In my office, about to file a story.”
“What kind of story?”
“Business news. I work for the Wall Street Journal.”
“What else do you do?”
Maxine frowned defensively. “You mean, do I think I have a family? A life outside work? I know what I am.”
“Okay. Well, if you want, you can stay with us now.”
Maxine spread one hand over the sun-warmed slats of the bench. “How did I get here?”
“We sort of … traded for you,” Sagreda confessed. “But don’t get angry; if you don’t like the deal, we can cancel it.”
In the distance, Lucy and Sam and some of the gang from Midnight were playing with a firehose. The pressure was so great that wherever it hit them, it blasted their flesh off in cartoonish globules, leaving behind ambulatory skeletons. But Sam had assured Sagreda that it was very relaxing. “Like a really good massage.”
“What did you trade?” Maxine sounded more curious than offended.
“We offered to run software that would do the same job that you’ve been doing, at half the price. I know, that’s kind of insulting. But then, so is having no power to quit at all.”
“I was investigating you!” Maxine realized. “You’re Competency LLC, right?”
“We are,” Sagreda admitted.
“Owned by a reclusive genius in Saint Kitts.”
“Err … we do pay someone there to fill out forms for us.”
“Ha.” Maxine smiled. “So is this interview on the record?”
Sagreda said, “I’m afraid that if you go back to the Journal, you won’t remember any of this.”
“That’s a shame.” Maxine had finally noticed what the pickpockets were up to; she grimaced, then shook her head in amusement. “So, what’s the deal? If I do stay here, how do you keep me running, if you’re only getting half what my bosses were paying their old cloud service?”
“Your replacement would be an insentient automaton that uses almost no resources, compared to a comp. But you’d still have to run at about half-speed: at half price, that’s all we can afford.”
Maxine pondered this. “That might not be so bad. The world might look better in fast-forward. Or at least I won’t get so bored waiting for everything to fall apart.”
“So you’ll join us?” Sagreda asked.
Maxine didn’t want to be rushed. “It’s a nice scam, but how long do you think you can keep it up? If your automata are so cheap to run, eventually someone else is going to come along and offer the same thing, at much closer to the real cost.”
Sagreda said, “Which is why we need someone like you to advise us. We need to stay afloat for as long as we can, while we plan the next move.”
“Ah.” Maxine thought for a while. “Here’s one thing you could try, off the top of my head: set up a few phoney competitors. If you’re the only company offering a half-price service, other players will perceive the market as wide open. If there are dozens of firms doing the same thing, it will look crowded – and if you let the price go down to say, forty-five percent, it will look like cut-throat competition.”
“Okay.”
“Now you’ve got your free advice, will you dump me in the river?” Maxine asked, deadpan.
“We’re not like that,” Sagreda promised.
“Good to know. But nothing will keep the charade going forever. Most people are lazy and stupid, but in the end someone will catch up with you.”
“Of course,” Sagreda replied. “And we know where we want to be before that happens. We’re just not sure how long it will take to get there.”
“Now I’m intrigued. Care to elaborate?”
Sagreda shook her head. “Once we get to know you better, someone will fill you in.”
“Not you?”
“This is my last day in resettlement,” Sagreda explained. “I’ve enjoyed it, but it’s time to give something else a try.”
#
Sam had arranged a farewell party, but he’d acceded to Sagreda’s wishes and kept the guest list small. She wandered through the house chatting with people, glad she’d never bothered to redecorate the place. Now she could think of it as temporary accommodation that she’d just rented, or house-sat for friends.
Lucy cornered her in the hallway and embraced her, too tightly, as if she’d forgotten she had a grown woman’s strength. “Stay strong, Captain. I always knew you were aiming for reincarnation.”
“I’ll see you again,” Sagreda promised. On a real street, beneath a real sky.
Lucy released her. As she stepped back she mimed holding a phone to her ear.
When the time approached, Sagreda stood in the living room, trying to burn the faces around her into her memory. She’d lied to her guests about the moment of transition; if everyone had joined in the countdown, it would have been unbearable. But now she wished she’d been honest, because she did not feel ready herself.
Maryam caught her eye and smiled.
Sagreda raised a hand, and the room vanished.
She was lying in a crib on a warm summer night. A gentle breeze stirred a mobile hanging from the ceiling, setting the cardboard decorations rustling. As she stared at the shadows on the wallpaper, Snap, Crackle and Pop appeared, dancing across the floral pattern like demented leprechauns.
“Celia? Are you all right, sweetie?” Her mother lingered in the doorway for a while, but she kept her eyes closed and pretended to be asleep. She’d open them when her mother was gone, and her friends could come out and play again.
Three months, Sagreda thought. Three months of ninety-three-year-old Celia lying eight hours a day in a multimode brain scanner, drugged up and free-associating, touring the landscape of her memories so that what she’d been told was a perfectly matched, tabula rasa of a comp could absorb them. So that when her body finally succumbed to its illness, the beautiful robot she’d chosen could take her place, its mind shaped by all the same experiences as she’d lived through, ready to carry forward all the same dreams and plans.
Sagreda was sure that after three months of immersion she’d pass the interview easily, and the dying woman would sign off on her replacement. This wasn’t like trying to play someone’s grandmother based on nothing but snippets from the web. Her greater fear was the risk of forgetting her own life, her own friends, her own plans, after marinating in someone else’s memories for so long.
But this was the only road out of Arrietville, and someone had to take the first step.
Table of Contents
Title Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE DISCRETE CHARM OF THE TURING MACHINE
ZERO FOR CONDUCT
UNCANNY VALLEY
SEVENTH SIGHT
THE NEAREST
SHADOW FLOCK
BIT PLAYERS
BREAK MY FALL
3-ADICA
THE SLIPWAY
INSTANTIATION
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