Singularity's Children Box Set

by Toby Weston

  Keith answered truthfully. “No.”

  “Spin foams, Lorentzian quantum gravity?”

  “Nope.”

  “Of course not. Then I am assuming that you might have some gaps in your space-time curvature-induced objective reduction?”

  Keith’s blank look was enough.

  “We’re finished here,” Narasimhan said crossly to Niato. “Take him away and get him a PhD. Then come back when you won’t be completely wasting my time!”

  “Err, perhaps I could try and explain, just the gist. If you like?” the research assistant suggested, scooting over on his chair. The young man looked like he desperately wanted an opportunity to communicate with other humans other than his prickly and taciturn ‘cell mate’.

  Abhyuday turned away. Without a word, he grabbed a huge pair of presumably noise-cancelling ear cans and let the currents pull him back beneath his sea of math.

  The crusty dreadlocked postdoc took this as a yes and slid further towards Keith on his chair.

  “Right, well, I guess, to keep it simple, right?” he said enthusiastically. “Let’s just assume that somewhere, at the highest energies, we have like a grid of computation. You okay with that?”

  Keith looked at Niato and raised his eyebrows. “Nick?”

  “Go on,” Niato said, ignoring Keith.

  “The grid computes the fields—which are, you know, particles and matter and so forth,” the postdoc continued. Narasimhan was listening, despite trying not to and trying to look like he wasn’t.

  “I am not one hundred per cent sure I am with you,” Keith admitted.

  “Big computer calculating reality,” Niato said quietly.

  “Not better, but go on,” Keith said.

  “Right, well, basically, intracellular components, mostly the cytoskeleton, seem to be able to build up dynamic, circularly entangled recursive quantum configurations that can side-load algorithms onto the non-classical ultimate compute grid for execution of arbitrary computation.” The postdoc finished up, smiling, his job clearly done.

  “Right. Now you might have lost us both there,” Niato confided.

  “Okay, okay! Enough of this incomprehensible nonsense!” Abhyuday ripped his headphones off and let his head drop into his hands. He clasped the sides of his face with his fingers and vigorously rubbed the heal of his palms into his eye sockets. “Clearly you will not leave me in peace to do my work! Luke! Back to the simulations!”

  Luke, suitably chided, slid his chair back to his small table by the wall.

  Niato glanced at Keith, subtly raising his eyebrows.

  “You, Commander, are not a scientist. Which is not your fault,” Abhyuday conceded, turning to Keith—although, in truth, his tone did not seem to fully endorse this statement. “These sounds that Luke makes are only words to you. You will not gain understanding. Luckily, many thousands of years ago, a tale was made to teach this knowledge to simple peasant minds. Perhaps I may try and explain to you from this tradition?” He looked at Keith, probably assuming he was too dim to appreciate this thinly veiled insult. Niato nodded slightly, prompting the doctor to continue.

  “The human mind is a social organ. You see, we work with personalities better than equations. This is why the ancient sages chose to represent deeper truths through stories of gods. Do you see?” Abhyuday paused for a moment. “Our gurus teach that your ego, which we call Åtman, is not separate but is one with Brahman, the universe.” Abhyuday looked at Keith, perhaps hoping for signs of comprehension. “Vishnu is dreaming the universe as he floats on the Milky Ocean on the back of the endless serpent, Ananta. The wind of his dreams stirs the ocean, creating ripples in which we are his broken reflections. And we, our Åtman, create in turn internal ripples that are our thoughts within the ocean of our own minds.”

  “That’s much clearer,” Keith said. Abhyuday smiled for the first time, entirely missing the sarcasm.

  “Good. You see, it is all one. The ocean, the dream, the dreamer. It is all nested.”

  Keith had actually heard most of this before from Niato, who waxed lyrical at the slightest provocation. It was nonsense, of course, but even Keith would admit it was evocative nonsense.

  “Sure, why not,” he said. “This is all the dream of a sleeping god, right?”

  Abhyuday, still looking intently at Keith, seemed to be encouraged by the interest, or at least the absence of cynicism.

  “Remember, don’t get stuck in the superficial,” Niato said. “It’s all metaphor.”

  “Got it,” Keith replied. “Gods are concepts, not people with colourful skin and too many arms.”

  “Precisely!” Abhyuday said happily. “Personifications, gods, are only placeholders for concepts which were difficult to articulate to pre-scientific peasants. Like dreaming.” He paused and leant towards Keith, who got the impression the next bit was important. “Dreaming is thought. Can we agree that thought is a form of computation?”

  “Okay, I guess so. Yes,” Keith replied cautiously. He felt like a schoolboy standing at the front of the class, being drilled on something his mind flatly refused to accommodate.

  “Then, why don’t we try and translate into our modern language? Instead of saying the universe is Vishnu’s dream, we can reformulate by saying reality computes itself into existence. You see? All is computation!”

  Niato clapped his hands. Abhyuday’s findings might be new age quackery, but Niato clearly found it all very energising.

  “This chair you see here that feels so solid, your body,” continued Abhyuday. “The closer you look, right down to the level of quarks and the electrons even, it is all math and computation. Dreams, if you prefer. The fields and waves of the four fundamental forces are not fundamental at all. They are the phenomenological manifestations of an underlying computational substrate. This is the non-classical ultimate reality. It is the same endless Milky Ocean of computation. Space and time are emergent properties. So is mind. One is Brahman and the other Åtman.” He paused. “Do you follow? Do you see where it is leading?”

  “You are blowing my mind a little,” said Keith. “It takes me back to a lot of dorm room conversations I had at university. I think I am getting a Pavlovian craving for puff.” He was trying to lighten things up. Luke laughed, but the doctor obviously didn’t get the reference and looked helplessly at the King.

  “Come on, Keith, stay focused,” Niato chided.

  “Sorry, I just don’t usually listen to this sort of thing without a great milky ocean of smoke,” Keith said, again playing to his audience of one. Luke smiled, but didn’t risk another laugh. “Okay, sorry. Carry on. I do actually keep getting little flashes of comprehension. It is a beautiful picture. Nick here told me that you have somehow weighed thoughts and this seems to be important for my next fantastically risky and important mission... I don’t want to rush you, but I can’t quite see the connection yet?”

  “I see,” said Abhyuday. “So, let me digress a bit. You know what a virus is?”

  “Computer or STD?” Keith said. Luke suppressed another snigger.

  “Keith!”

  “Sorry.”

  “They are the same,” said Abhyuday. “Only patterns of information. Even if we find aliens with a different genetic structure, not even DNA, but something else, you can be very sure they will have viruses, too. The virus is a pattern, you see.”

  “Same concept different levels. Got it.”

  “Computation is the most fundamental pattern and it is found at many different levels.” Abhyuday paused again, waiting for Keith to show he understood. Keith was trying, but this was a bit abstract.

  Luke slid over again and tried a different approach. “Take my workstation, or your Companion. You interact with a program running on an emulator, within a virtual machine, on top of a hardware abstraction layer, on a micro controller, on a piece of silicon, exploiting semiconductor gates. At each layer, we have computation...”

  “Yes, thank you, Luke,” Abhyuday said, cutting off his assi
stant again. “Commander, your mind—do you believe it is a computer?”

  “No, but I accept it probably is,” said Keith. “That’s what you are going to tell me, right?”

  “No! This is the point! Some still see the mind as emerging from a hierarchical stack of layers, each resting on the layer below, treating it as only a black box. If we compare this to Luke’s computer analogy, then mind is a program and the brain the processor. We just swap cortical columns for chips, neurones for gates, microtubules for transistors. You see? Then it’s the same, just atoms, electrons, quarks and bosons, all the way down like a staircase. All the way to the bottom, which takes us back to the rippling Milky Ocean of quantum possibility that Vishnu floats on.”

  “Right, I see that,” said Keith. “Programs running on chips made of atoms. But you said this is how we used to think? You are saying that view is wrong?”

  “Yes, of course!” replied Abhyuday. “The mind does not come from the brain. Åtman does not come from Brahman! They are one and the same!”

  Keith tried to think it through again. “A program runs on a computer, which is just atoms. So a program comes from the computer. But you say that my mind is not like that, not the same as a computer program? I like that, because I don’t think I am just a program. That doesn’t feel right. But I can’t really see how I am different from my companion’s avatar and the Spex that she runs on?”

  “Ah ha! Finally, an intelligent question! They are not the same. Your avatar is created by the computer, but you are not created by your brain. How can this be?” Abhyuday continued with a little too much relish. “You are getting confused?”

  Keith was starting to feel a little patronised. The doctor was deriving far too much satisfaction from tying Keith’s mind into knots. Although, on further reflection, it was probably fair revenge for Keith tying Abhyuday’s body into knots and bouncing him in the boot of a car for hours.

  “Each underlying layer is more potent than the one above,” said Abhyuday. “Like we said, it is dreams within dreams—or, in our modern language, algorithms computing each level above them.”

  “You know how a program made with hardware runs much faster than the same program emulated on a virtual machine?” Luke asked, braving Abhyuday’s scowls. “So it is with reality. Each successive layer offers more power…”

  “Right down to the bottom, to the Milky Ocean,” Abhyuday interjected.

  Keith could sense he was getting close to the punch line.

  “Your dreams are real within your mind, but they are only reflections of Vishnu’s dreams,” continued Abhyuday. “But Vishnu’s dreams, blowing across the Milky Ocean, also create ripples that manifest as Brahman, the external reality!” The doctor clapped his hands together in excitement. “Both Brahman and Åtman come from the same place. Mind and physical reality are peers, one does not come from the other! Do you see?”

  Keith was beginning to get an inkling of an understanding. Niato had clearly heard it all before, but was still sitting on the edge of his chair, like a child listening to the best bit of his favourite story.

  “For billions of years,” said Abhyuday, “single-celled organisms competed. Breeding and multiplying. Following the sun and chemical gradients and enacting their simple behaviours. All vying for resources, striving for the intellectual edge that would allow them to outwit their peers. At some point, some random confluence of mutations permitted computation within these cells to take a shortcut. Instead of running algorithms on its protein computers, the organism found it could encode its queries at the atomic level. In order to compute molecular physics, reality must solve the bacterium’s queries first. The microbe had hacked reality, tricking it into executing its arbitrary code. This primitive ancient organism was the first life form to evolve a way of using non-local quantum parallelism to solve its survival problems!”

  “Like a game cheat. Or more like a program running in an emulator, hacking itself directly onto the processor!” Luke added. “Consciousness is a Zeno algorithm running on top of infinity! The mind is a singularity! We are all Singularity’s Children!”

  “Alright, Luke! Don’t you have work you should be doing?” Abhyuday asked impatiently.

  Chapter 17 – Detonation

  It was late May and cicadas, clinging to the orange and lemon trees, were already putting out an astonishingly loud chorus. The air was so saturated with trilling that, at times, it seemed to exceed some internal threshold and faded into the background; to drop out of conscious perception entirely, only to return with a rush, when some change in rhythm or volume jolted the brain out of denial.

  Thousands of bricks and stone blocks were still piled up in neat, shoulder-high stacks. From the surface, however, there were no signs of subterranean activity.

  The platform juddered into motion. It descended, taking Segi and his three long bolts of nano-cloth into the cool air below.

  He traversed a short tunnel. Graceful parabolas of brick were visible beneath wipe-down acrylic surfaces. The tunnel splayed open and merged with a cavernous domed room filled with the black, billowing membranes of a tent.

  Despite the pitch black, Segi navigated confidently, following the virtualised geometry his Spex projected. He stood next to the black nano-cloth and let his augmented vision peer through its sealed flap. Three spectral Zakis were supervising a small team of dexterous, reed-limbed oids bristling with an assortment of grippers, snippers, and blowers. They were laying sheets of graphene nano-cloth onto the almost completed hull.

  If additive manufacturing was time-reversed decay, inside the tent was a giant un-rotting carcass. An infestation of tiny bots, like the crabs and shrimps scavenging a sunk dead whale, scuttled around and explored its many still gaping wounds. On a whale, these legions would be the sites of missing soft tissues—here, they were couplings waiting for systems too delicate for bulk printing. Razzia interference in Forward Europe meant that the majority of these specialist parts were now arriving on kites from the East and South.

  Their entire bioreactor setup had been turned over to graphene production for the past thirty months. In addition, Shelob and her siblings—who had grown disconcertingly large—were spinning around the clock, secreting sheets of miracle fabric a metre wide, many metres long, but only a few thousand atoms thick. Segi was here to deliver another batch. The print cavern was dust free and Segi—a walking, shedding reservoir of particles—was far too unclean to enter. Instead, he handed the rolls to one of his brother’s waldos. Then, he took a seat on a box of epoxy bottles and let his perception drift into the cavern.

  A ghost amongst the golems.

  Segi’s point of view was constructed from hundreds of mounted cameras and the swarming light Bees that cruised the cavern. The huge 3D printer, which hung from the ceiling, used the same multi-perspective visual stream to coordinate its precise movements. Segi tried to start up a conversation with this brother as he drifted over the frenzy of construction; however, from the frequent pauses and the imprecise mumbling, he concluded that social participation was something Zaki would only be capable of when other high-priority tasks had been resolved.

  With installation and integration of modules fully underway, Zaki was again immersed twelve to eighteen hours a day. Segi hated to see his brother folding into the digital, losing his sense of humanity. On the occasions when they sat down together in the evenings, he couldn’t ignore Zaki’s sunken eyes and vestigial-looking limbs.

  Segi watched as the head rotated, bringing another of its spinnerets into place. It whizzed off to the other end of the chamber to exude some other material.

  Segi gave up trying to talk after a few minutes. It was frustrating; Zaki was too distracted, his conversation halting and broken as he multiplexed between tasks and bodies. Segi gave an angry shrug and returned to his own body.

  He didn’t have time to dwell on Zaki’s bad manners. Even with all the automated help, there was still an endless list of low-tech tasks to be taken care of. Olive and pista
chio trees needed to be cared for. Grafting and pruning were spring and winter work, but the trees always needed water and their great-aunt insisted that the soil around their roots be regularly turned and weeded. It was something he and their mother enjoyed doing together, and whenever possible Segi tried to make time to join her. Kneeling on cushions made of empty fertiliser bags stuffed with old blankets, they would spend hours, working mostly in silence. It was meditation. Simple. Peaceful companionship. After witnessing his brother animating golems in the stuffiness of a tomb, he was ready to join his mother under the warmth of a physical sun.

  On his way, blinking in the harsh light, he swore as an alert arrived. Productivity on some bioreactor pipes had been dropping for the last couple of days. He had hoped it was just grime blocking the sun and had already sent a drone on inspection. It was equipped with a brush, so that it could scrub some bird shit and dust from the fat Perspex tubes. The drone had complained that the tube was clean and Segi now needed to engage his brain and solve the problem himself. If they were unlucky, it could be the first signs of an infection. If not caught and corrected, the malaise might well spread and, in the worst-case scenario, the pipes would become blocked with toxic clumps of slime that would need to be scraped out by hand. Digital detox would have to wait.