Glow, p.31
Glow, page 31
“What have you done to yourself, Del? You’re dead, a corpse with a carved-up brain. Narlins claims he was just obeying your orders.”
Del shrugged. “He did what I told him to do, Elly – kill me slowly.”
“I am going to need a proper explanation, Del.”
He sighed and leaned on the wooden balcony, just a man on holiday in the beautiful mountains. “Where to begin?”
“How about the bit where you stuck the Star-River inside your skull.”
“Great place to start. I dumped my first attempt at interfacing with it and rigged a direct, neural connection to my hippocampus. Took a while to debug and configure, but it worked well enough. The Star-River became an extension of my memory.”
“But why? It was a demonstration of future memory technology, never meant to be a device of prediction.”
“Game theory, Elly. Spend enough time setting up your pieces, get the input as realistic as possible. The Star-River is fundamentally a physics engine, the perfect predictor of outcomes for any given set of initial conditions. Set the pieces, run the model, and it throws out terrifyingly good estimates of where our society goes next. Waypoints, I call them, attractor states if you’re into chaos. States that are inevitable: no matter how hard we try and avoid them, they happen anyway.
“After years of playing the prediction game, I came to the conclusion that humanity never wins. We defeat ourselves every time.”
“I get it, Del. You think we’re screwed. The voidian take over the galaxy, war with the Alliance wrecks the world, or the nanomachines in our bodies unite and rise up in the great somanetic plague that ravages everything into an optimized hellscape. I doubt you’ve noticed, but we have more immediate problems to solve.”
“There’s no way out for humanity, not in its current configuration. In order to change we must embrace one of these dangerous technologies and use it against the others.”
“An arms race?”
“The somanetic plague is an immediate threat, so I’m going to infiltrate it. The threat escalates as collections of disparate minds come together and form singular super-minds. If I can be on the inside, become one of those guiding minds, then I can harness this power and use it against the other, possibly bigger threats.”
Ellayna took a stab at where Del was going. “You think you can load this–” she waved a hand at Del, “–simulation of Del into the plague and control it?”
Del’s mischievous grin emerged and for a second they were teenagers again, plotting humanity’s destiny over a map and textbook. “Let me show you something really cool!” He eased her onto a bench and sat beside her. “Let’s start with where we are.” A woolen blanket appeared from nowhere and wrapped around them. “The Bighorn mountains in what was once the United States. My family owned this cabin. We came here for our summer vacations when I was young. Here I am now, look…”
A small, blond-haired boy ran barefoot across the deck clutching a teddy bear. The bear wore a fishbowl space helmet and had NASA stamped on his spacesuit. Young Del zoomed the bear around like a rocket and made whooshing noises as he ran.
“You were adorable, Del,” she said, easing close to escape the chill.
“Here’s Mother and Father, Gran and my sister Nell. You remember all of them, I’m sure, from when we grew older.” The family appeared on another bench, gazing out over the mountains. The little girl hopped off and ran to play with the boy who fled back inside the house. “Go put some warm clothes on,” their Mother yelled at their backs.
“This, Elly, is my greatest invention.” She stared, expecting something fantastic to appear, but the family just carried on chatting and interacting around them as if they weren’t there.
The answer dawned. “A simulation of your childhood?”
“A very detailed simulation of my whole life. Narlins helped, using memory-recall drugs to pry details out of my subconscious. We used VR and Inner-I interfacing to record memories and some good, old-school machine learning to reconstruct detailed memories from snippets and fragments, a bit like restoring old photos or colorizing black-and-white movies. There’s probably only ten-percent of my actual life here, but it’s the important stuff, those key moments – the gist of Del.”
She shook her head. “But you’re not really Del. You just think that you are.”
“Once I had a simulation of my life on a VR server, I created nascent minds, blanks, like virtual children, and let them live my life in fast forward computer time. They grew up as Del, met what they thought was a real Ellayna and fell in love, started the GFC. All that stuff happened in just moments of real time, but to them it was a lifetime. And they really were Del.”
“Remarkable. But, no. Still not Del,” she said, digging in for the fight.
He shrugged, “I made a kind of Del-based Turing test. Set a whole bunch of simulated Dels to try and fool an adjudicator, which of course, was me. Or real Del, depending on your perspective. An adversarial network of Dels vying to impress the real thing. The winners survived the cut and passed on into simulations of the future. There, they were tested on moral and technical decisions to see if they did what the real Del thought he would do.”
“People learned to fake Turing tests decades ago. They were never actually people, just algorithms. You, you’re just an algorithm.”
“Always the sceptic, Elly,” he laughed. “And in this case, up to this point, you might be right. But here’s the real genius, and the answer to your questions about me ablating my own brain. Imagine an old-fashioned pocket calculator but with a wireless connection to your mind. You simply think of a calculation and the answer pops into your head. The calculator becomes part of your embodied consciousness. You don’t bother doing actual math in your head anymore, that bit of your brain atrophies and shrivels or you remove it by jabbing some crucial connections, but in your mind you remain a math genius able to do any calculation you can think of.”
Ellayna tapped her temple. “My Inner-I does just that. So well in fact that it immerses me in its fake worlds and seas of information.”
“But I took this way further, Elly. Imagine that instead of a calculator you have a copy of yourself. A whole mental construct called Ellayna, running in parallel, whose memory and cognitive functions you can access as if they are your own.”
“You could slowly remove the original or let it atrophy and force the copy to take over.” She felt vaguely sick at the thought of Narlins etching away Del’s mind in the crossbeam of some laser: Killing him slowly.
“I found myself gradually less conscious of my physical surroundings and increasingly more in tune and more aware of my virtual reality. To me, I am still Del, always have been. A contiguous being from birth to this moment. I call the process consciousness migration, as I changed my mental substrate one functional piece at a time until all my consciousness seamlessly migrates to the artificial substrate.”
Her mouth dropped open as she tried to fault the idea. “So… You, you really are Del?”
“In my mind, yes, but so are all the others I copied.” He winked. “I like to think I’m the original though.”
“And then you just load this mind state onto another substrate?”
“A somanetic drug substrate. I wanted to use Simmorta but it’s too restrictive. So when my contacts on Earth discovered Glow–” He let the revelation hang for Ellayna and all her fellow listeners to absorb.
“Hacked Simmorta, unlimited, unconstrained. Are you the mastermind that broke the GFC’s unbreakable security code, Del?”
“I can’t claim that accolade, but I hope to meet them one day soon. At least, a version of me will.”
She felt tears grow in her eyes. Crazy, crazy Del. The little boy who was bullied at school but wanted to change the world. Not just the world, the whole universe. Many questions rushed to mind. “Is Ursurper Gale just another version of you?”
“One of my early attempts. A simulated mind with memory implants. He never actually lived my life in VR. It took many years of prison work for me to build the full simulation, and of course Gale was gone by then.”
“Why does he think there are other voidian on Cloud9?”
Del smirked. “I might have implanted a few extra, shall we say, false memories. My way of making sure the thorn stayed sharp, with its pointed end aimed in the right direction.”
“This Glow-substrate version of Del, I assume it’s no longer on Cloud9?”
His grin turned more menacing. “I’ve escaped, Elly. Escaped prison, escaped the GFC, escaped the limitations of my frail human body. I am what comes next!”
She stifled her anger, or was it jealousy? “This drug-version of Del needs a body. How does that get you inside the plague?”
“Can’t tell you all my secrets, Elly.”
“Why not? We might decide to help.”
“The GFC is finished. You need to flee, Ellayna. Escape. May you find allies in unexpected places.”
Ellayna suddenly couldn’t stop laughing. “A copy of Del on Coriolis Island. Into the heart of the infestation. Did you know that Gale has made another voidian and sent it there? Do you think he’s there for a reason? Maybe it’s hunting Del and his beloved Star-River?” She enjoyed watching Del’s bubble of smug confidence pop.
Del looked confused for a while but regrouped. “Gale’s been his own entity for years. He has his own mind, full of his own ideas, and follows his own path.”
“Can I persuade you to contact Gale and get him to call off his absurd attack?” But Del was fading, already transparent as if self-deleting one pixel at a time. “Del? Help us.”
“Goodbye, Elly, please save yourself. The GFC is not worth any more sacrifices.”
He vanished, and she was alone amongst the silent frozen figures of Del’s childhood. “Did you get all that, Martin?” she messaged.
“Wild!” A video icon popped into her mind. “This came through a few moments ago, Ellayna. If your mind is not already blown by talking to disembodied Del, then watch this confession.”
“Confession?” The video ran, showing a white, plastic face with odd, drawn-on features. “Machine nuns?”
“Calls itself Sister-Zero from the Sisters of Salvitor. One of our founder’s, Joselyn Salvitor’s, creations. It has quite the tale to tell.”
Jett watched the woman dangling in his hyper-strength grip. His hand circled her head, dozens of branching fingers snaking through her hair and across her face. A pointed fingertip pierced the skin just below her left eye as blood ran down her cheek into the laugh line angling up from the corner of her mouth.
She choked and spluttered. Words bubbled continuously from her lips. “Get your fucking hands off me you slimy-assed shit-fucking oil slick–” She fought, spitting, punching, tearing her fingernails away against Jett’s fullerene skin. Jett liked this woman, this Mira. She was a warrior.
He’d learned many things by interrogating Yellow’s stream of Glow addicts. His vocabulary had expanded wildly in just the few moments he’d held Mira aloft. Words and concepts centered around an apparent obsession with fornication and defecation. He tried explaining to her that he didn’t need such things, but that didn’t seem to help.
So many lives. So many stories. But were any of them useful in his mission to understand Glow, find the Star-River and hunt down Rex?
His last pair of victims needn’t have died. He’d perfected the art of slipping, unnoticed, inside their somanetic networks without tripping defenses. This gave him time to explore, to revel in their memories. He tripped them anyway, enjoying watching as each person’s mind melted and imploded.
“Why did you come here, Mira?”
She ceased her struggle, hanging limp like a dead thing. Her eyes found his, and there was that special, human moment when people seemed able to look into each other’s cores. “Just wanted another chance. Something to go right. I have information. Trade it for a fix. Just–” She shrieked as he pierced her nerves, drilling through the channels, ignoring the biological pain and focusing on calm, obfuscating signals. I am just more Glow. Another fix. Love me, accept me.
She didn’t faint like most of the others, in fact she fought harder, grinding her teeth with effort. This person had experienced real pain. He saw it in her somanet, the swathes of scabbed-over memories and buried experiences.
“I doubt you have any information I need,” he said.
“We killed Auld, your rogue lich,” Mira said, barely able to control her mouth through the pain. “Thorne promised a reward.”
“I’m not Thorne.” Jett pushed deeper and Mira faded, passing the pain threshold that ended most humans. She hovered on the edge of consciousness, resigned, waiting, but still unable to concede defeat.
“You owe me…” she slurred. Jett tasted her rage. He was angry too, frustrated with his own failure. The pair resonated. They were both livid, comrades in emotion.
Her somanet welcomed him inside. He modeled a mash of confused personas, each vying to distinguish itself to their new host, clamoring for the prize: a fleeting moment on the stage of consciousness.
Mira’s mind reminded him of the beach where he washed up: dark but crowded, with its constellation of campfires and the sparkles of watching human eyes. Fully immersed, he wandered amongst them, stoking some, quenching others. All while feeling warm, welcome, surrounded by friends, until that moment he triggered the network, and its rampant defenses expelled him in one heaving, mental convulsion, back into the real world. He hadn’t figured a way around that yet, didn’t really want or need to. The ejection felt good, like being spat back into space. Go explore somewhere else!
“I see you,” she said, calm and unfocused. “You’re in my mind.” Her many personas, like bugs on flypaper, flickered on and off in a game of roulette as her attention pinned them with its light before shifting on to the next.
“Know thy enemy, Mira,” Jett said. He homed in on the ripest cluster of memory, laden with raw, aching emotion, and pried away the scabs concealing it. This was the treasure he wanted. The grist of what it was to feel and be human. “Why hide from yourself, Mira?” But she remained silent as if his uncovering of her true self was something that even she, this warrior, couldn’t face.
He tore away the bandages, the scabs, the false memories and lies, digging through the chaff of forgotten lives, burrowing, layer after layer. This truth had been copied and buried so many times it had to be real.
And there it was, so heavy it crushed the strength from his body. He flowed to the floor dragging her down on top of him. Yes… feed me this experience!
“You had this coming, Corrine!” a man yelled. But she only sees the gun’s gaping muzzle.
“No!” she screamed. Throwing herself between the gun and her child. Noble, strong, a sacrifice!
“No, please. I’ll do anything, anything!” She hears the shots, but they mean nothing. She feels nothing! Even the pain of the bullet in her own chest means nothing.
“Christ no… please no–”
How she kneels. How she gathers the fragments of his face as if she can bring them back together and make him whole again.
And suddenly Jett knew what it was like to vomit himself senseless, to beat his own brains from his skull on a wall, a floor, on a bed post in a padded cell.
Mira… Mira… How do you survive this pain?
She laughed! “That’s not me you idiot fuck! Any more than these things in your head are really you.”
She’s inside of me! Jett’s perception swam to the surface and back into the office where he stared up at Mira’s sagging face. “Come, Mira, embrace the truth. Own your existence.”
Her mouth opened, spilling stomach bile down onto his face. Her words came in ectoplasmic spasms, jabbed straight into his mind through her somanet. “You have no fucking idea. You dare to judge my life, my fight to become something in this world. I endured childbirth while the world fell apart around me. I forged a family out of that shitstorm, only to have it ripped away from me. All of it. One stupid mistake. After surviving that, I’m here, dying at the hands of… whatever the fuck you are and that conning, vile, yellow-bellied prick.” She dropped into silence as if saying her piece had fulfilled some urgent need, and now there was nothing left to do.
Jett eased upright, supporting her limp body like a twist of rags in his giant hand. She was dreaming now, reconstructing a different moment in time.
You have more? Yes, there’s more!
A dusty yard teased by wind, rain, thunder and lightning. A fragile man with a curved spine and tufted ears, facing down the lich.
It’s him. The man in chains – Rex!
The battle played out to a thumping heartbeat as she rushed toward the seething mass of dogs and exploding fur. He felt Mira’s love, her despair, that everything she had was now gone, taken. Again. More loss to bury, to scar-over and hide – except she hadn’t, not yet. It remained raw and bleeding, a trophy, a war wound to drive her on to some greater purpose.
Rex sank to his knees cradling the top half of the massive dog. “Find what you need in there, you shit?” The voice came from Mira’s mouth and mind simultaneously. The delay of conscious translation giving it a strange echo.
“I see you know Rex,” Jett said, and snapped awake, mind jangling with Mira’s panic and denial. “You can’t hide it. I see your feelings, your… love?”
“Fucking get out of my head–” The blast of her anger nearly tore Jett’s connection away.
“This man fought the lich, Mira. He deserves the reward, not you. Tell me where he is. I’ll deliver the reward myself.”
“Rot in hell.”
“Where did this battle occur? Don’t make me hurt you even more, Mira.”
“Hurt me? You think you can hurt me?”
Jett reached for the small, metallic cylinder that Yellow had brought back from the reclamation plant earlier. “Glow, Mira, ten doses. It’s what you want.” Her eyes lit. She grabbed at the cylinder, but he moved it away, feeling her somanet explode with expectations.
“Rex…” blurted a voice that was not her own. “Fucking glowworms!” she countered.
