I was genuinely taken aback. “Hawaii...isn’t part of the sim?”
Kali smiled sympathetically, a tinge of regret in her eyes. “Sorry. Come on,” she said, grabbing my wrist and leading me to the kitchen. “Make us some warm milk while I explain it to you.”
My eyes lit up as my opportunity suddenly emerged from out of nothing. “Okay. That sounds nice.”
Kali perched herself atop a barstool while I maneuvered into the kitchen, opening a cupboard in search of a saucepan. “You know those aug glasses you’re wearing?” she began rhetorically as she pointed at my glasses. “After a few years of people all over the world wearing those, taking spherized photos and videos of their surroundings in ultrahigh definition and uploading them to the Net, eventually a perfect virtual map of the world went online. It was sutured together, like a gigantic quilt, from the experiences of every user on Earth. If you wanted to experience Times Square without the airfare, all you had to do was log into the sim, and you could find a 360-degree sphere of any part of it. You could even wander around! If you wanted to experience a video, you could become a rider and follow a first-person walkthrough, but if you saw a shop to your right that you wanted to go into that your POV walked straight by, all you had to do was leave your ride, turn to your right, and head straight in. The sims were updated daily, so sometimes, even if you saw a t-shirt on sale that you just had to have, the last one on the rack in your size, you could click on it and be patched right through to the staff at the store. As long as it was still there, you could get them to package it up and send it to you.” Kali’s eyes lingered upon me the entire time as she explained the world of, what to me should have been the near future, but to her was the distant past.
I’d turned on the element on the stove and placed the saucepan on it before retrieving the carton of milk from the fridge. I paused casually as I turned to her, feigning extreme interest in technology that I’d already foreseen in my writings so that I could buy time. I needed her to turn away so that I could get the Ketamine into the pot. “So these 360-degree videos and photos—”
“We call them ‘spheres,’” she informed me.
“These spheres...that’s what the post-humans used to build their sims?”
She smiled and nodded. “That’s right. You can go to any post-augmented reality era you choose—the records are all there. The spheres are used to build sims for games, movies, personal fantasies—you name it.”
“So, why is Hawaii missing?” I asked as I nonchalantly began to pour the milk into the pan.
“You should measure that into two cups first,” she said, her attention suddenly on my handling of the warm milk-making.
I smiled, sensing my opportunity. “Sorry. You’re right.” I retrieved the Ketamine from my pocket as I stepped to the cupboard and reached in, my arms now obscured from her view. I splashed the Ketamine into one of the mugs and left the vial in the cupboard as I pulled the two mugs out and set them on the counter. “You were saying? Hawaii?”
“Yes, Hawaii,” she replied. “It’s best if I show you. Look,” she said, pointing upward.
I glanced to where she was pointing and a holographic rendering of the Earth suddenly appeared, albeit incomplete, as though it were a partial tracing done of a textured globe with a crayon. “You can activate my aug glasses remotely?”
“Cool trick, huh?” she said, smiling proudly.
I smiled back dutifully, but I didn’t like that idea at all. It meant she could’ve been monitoring me at anytime after all. Nevertheless, I couldn’t reveal the terror this caused me as she continued her explanation. Instead, I gazed earnestly at her holographic rendering of the sim. The continental United States was nearly complete, as was most of Europe and some large portions of Southeast Asia, but beyond that, the map was nearly empty.
“That is our sim in its entirety,” Kali said. “That’s our whole world.”
I’d used my mug to measure out two mugs’ worth of milk. It was warming steadily.
“The technology to make the maps run as perfect sims, indistinguishable from reality, requires enormous processing power,” Kali continued. “Individual sim scenarios like the one you’re in push even the limits of our advanced technology. To make it run smoothly and reduce rebooting time, I only simulate the areas of the globe where you personally conduct business. If I re-created everything, it would eat up enormous memory, because I’d have to populate those regions with people. I’m an impatient person, so I cut corners.”
“So...no Hawaiian vacation then,” I said, pretending disappointment in an attempt to get her guard down.
“Aww,” she said as she began to get up and circle the counter to enter the kitchen.
My eyes widened, and I went to her, desperate to keep her from the Ketamine-filled cup. Her arms were held out for an embrace and I accommodated.
“I’m sorry, Pookie. If I’d have known—”
“It’s all right.” I smiled.
“You know,” she began, a new idea suddenly bouncing in her eyes as she turned away from me excitedly and began to leave the kitchen. “I could upload Hawaii! All I’d have to do is just exit the sim and—”
“No, don’t do that,” I said, shaking my head and grinning, trying my best not to look desperate.
“It’ll only take a few minutes. It’s worth it for two weeks in Hawaii! I’ve got a couple of bikinis you’ll love.”
If she tried to leave the sim and discovered she couldn’t, there would, quite literally, be hell to pay. I bounded to her just as she made it to the threshold of the room, grabbed her by the arm, spun her around, and kissed her as deeply as I could. She slackened against me, receiving the kiss. When I felt adequate time had passed, I pulled back, smiling. “You can upload Hawaii in the morning. I’m not even sure if I want to go there or not. We should talk about it first anyway. No sense wasting valuable memory uploading a place we might not even go to.” I cradled her gently and walked her back toward the barstool and made sure she sat. “And we’ve got warm milk waiting. We can talk about our vacation uploads in bed.”
“Okay,” she smiled, nodding. “Is the milk ready?”
“I think so,” I said, sighing slightly, my relief impossible to hold back in its entirety. I quickly bound back into the kitchen, dipping my finger into the milk to make sure it was sufficiently warm but not too hot. “It’s ready, darling.”
“Yay!” she said, clapping and feigning sweetness. It was hard to believe she’d murdered several people earlier in the evening.
I poured our milk, extremely careful not to mix up the two mugs. When they were ready, I crossed the kitchen to her, praying that she’d accept the milk and drink it quickly.
She held out her hand and took it happily. “Mmm...I love warm milk,” she said as she took a large gulp.
“Me too,” I replied, my voice nearly failing me as I spoke. I took a small sip, my eyes glued to Kali the entire time. The dosage of Ketamine I was giving her was extremely high, as it was meant to be administered topically. Orally, the effects would be far more pronounced and, I hoped, far more fast-acting.
Kali was in the middle of a long sip when her wrist suddenly went slack and the mug dropped out of her hand, the rest of the milk splashing across the floor while the mug bounced once on the counter and then shattered against the tiles. “Something’s wrong,” she slurred before her worried eyes suddenly darted to mine, instantly becoming furious. “You!” she said, her eyes widening even further as she reached out to grab the sleeve of my robe. Her grip quickly became nothing, and she began to slide off her stool as if she was melting into a puddle, her eyelids fluttering. “I’ll...kill...you,” she managed to whisper before she fell to the ground, splashing into the milk.
“Oh thank God!” I shouted as I put down my mug and scrambled to my knees, the feeling of relief overwhelming. Kali was completely out, and I reached down to gather her up in my arms, out of the spilt milk; it occurred to me, somewhat absurdly, that I wouldn’t be crying over it
, unless they were tears of joy. I smiled as I carried her slack body into our bedroom and placed her on the bed. I sat on the bed’s edge and called Haywire.
“Hello?”
“It’s done. Now what?”
8
Haywire and John Doe sat across from me in my car as we sped through the night. As usual, I had no idea where we were headed, despite my ownership of the vehicle.
“No Mr. Big?” I asked of the gargantuan man, who was conspicuous by his absence.
“No,” John replied. “He has an enormously important mission: to keep Kali sedated for the duration of the evacuation.”
“Mr. Big and a team of our allies are with Kali now,” Haywire added. “They’ll make sure her dosage is sufficient and that her vitals remain strong. We have to make sure Kali can’t interfere, but we also have to make sure she remains safe.”
“She could die in the sim?” I asked, alarmed.
Haywire nodded. “If her avatar is damaged too severely, it could crumble. If that happens, Kali’s consciousness won’t have anywhere to go. She’ll remain comatose in the real world, but the sim will evaporate. We’ll lose everyone.”
“The safety of Kali’s avatar is our number one priority,” John added. “If we lose her, everything is lost.”
“What about you?” I asked. “If Kali can be hurt within the sim, what about post-humans who’ve hacked in?”
John took a deep breath. “Unfortunately, there is danger here for us as well. We are vulnerable.”
“But you said you were gods here,” I pointed out to Haywire.
“I said virtual gods,” Haywire corrected me, “and we are. But we have to exit the sim, just like everyone else. If the sim collapses while we’re inside, the effect will be the same as it is for Kali.”
“Coma?”
“That’s right,” Haywire confirmed, “if the damage isn’t too traumatic. Post-humans have emerged from sims that have collapsed before, but not without severe brain damage. We can be repaired thanks to back-up brain scans, but the process is long, painful, and we can never recoup the memories from before we made our backups.”
“And what if the damage is too severe?” I asked.
“Post-humans are very difficult to kill,” John stated, “but not impossible. We’ve lost colleagues before,” he said, glancing at Haywire, who returned his sad expression.
It was strangely soothing for me to hear that post-humans had been killed because of the collapse of sims. It comforted me to know that there was danger for all of us—I was not alone.
“The metaphysics of this consciousness business are still eluding me,” I admitted. “You said if the sim collapses, Kali’s consciousness won’t have anywhere to go, but isn’t consciousness just a subjective quality attributed to an individual by a third party?”
“The answer can be attained by performing a simple thought experiment,” John replied. “While it’s true that consciousness is a quality we attribute to a body and that consciousness cannot exist in and of itself, it is incorrect to say it is just a subjective quality.”
John Doe’s line of reasoning went against everything I thought I knew about critical thinking and logic. To me, it had always been a given that the Descartesian notion of mind/body dualism was a logical fallacy. Descartes assumed the existence of a soul, and that led him immediately astray in his attempt to formulate the ground-up theory of philosophy known as Foundationalism.
John smiled. “Right now, you’re thinking of Descartes. Correct?”
My mouth opened slightly in astonishment.
“You’re wondering if it’s possible that we’ve discovered evidence of a soul. You want to know if we use the terms ‘consciousness’ and ‘soul’ interchangeably.”
I nodded. “Yes. That’s right. But how did you—”
“Rest assured, Professor, that we haven’t found the soul. What we have found, however, is pattern recognition.”
As you can imagine, I was well aware of pattern recognition—I’d based my life’s work on the notion that computer intelligence was the result of pattern recognizers built into machines. However, what this had to do with separating consciousness from a body, I had no idea.
“You see,” John said, shifting forward in his chair, “what we perceive as consciousness is really just our individual abilities to recognize patterns. We recognize marks on a piece of paper that, together, form a letter, which, combined with other letters, form words. At a higher level, groups of words make sentences, and these sentences, once recognized, connect to other stored patterns in our minds. For instance, ‘A rose by any other name...’ might conjure the picture of a rose to appear in your thoughts, or a memory about giving a rose to a pretty girl, or a poem—”
“‘My love is like a red, red rose,’” I suddenly blurted out. “Robert Burns.”
John grinned. “That’s right. You see? You are a pattern recognizer and a pattern combiner. We all are. This is the essence of who we are—of our consciousness.”
“Then isn’t this proof that the mind and body are one?” I asked.
“It’s so ironic that you would ask that question, of all people,” John replied. “You who are without a body, yet conscious all the same.”
“Cogito ergo sum,” Haywire spoke, reminding me of the mantra I’d found in the immediate aftermath of discovering the existence of the sim.
“I think—”
“Therefore you are,” John finished. “You have no body, but a pattern exists, and that pattern makes you...you.”
“I’m a ghost in the machine.”
“That’s right,” John confirmed.
“Yet, that machine still has a body. The computer that is running this sim is physical!” I pointed out, desperate for grounding.
“Yes, but that machine is Kali’s brain working in conjunction with her sim-pod, and surely you won’t argue that you and Kali are one and the same.”
My brow furrowed. “So...I’m just a pattern? I’m just a complex algorithm? I’m...math?”
“We all are,” John replied. “Remember, it’s not the molecules that make you you. It’s whether your pattern is recognizing or not.”
“But Kali...her pattern recognition machine—her brain—is in the real world,” I pointed out.
“And yet, it’s not currently functioning, is it?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
John settled back in his seat. “Time for that thought experiment I mentioned earlier. Close your eyes,” he said as he gestured with his finger toward me. I did as he asked. “I want you to imagine that you are in two places at once.”
I tried to picture myself in two places. It felt uncomfortable. Try as I might, I could only imagine flipping rapidly back and forth from the two locations or awkwardly trying to comprehend overlaying two scenes, unable to control both concomitantly. “I can’t do it,” I finally admitted.
“Of course you can’t,” John replied. “Our brains didn’t evolve for that purpose. One day, perhaps we might design brain architectures so large and malleable that it will be possible for us to seamlessly juggle two separate realities at once, but no one—not even the post-humans—are there just yet. Therefore, just like the rest of us, your conscious awareness can only be in one location at a time. You can be in the sim or out of the sim, but never both places at once.”
“So you’re telling me that Kali’s consciousness is in the sim?”
“When she was awake, yes. Consciousness requires a functioning pattern recognizer.”
“But isn’t her avatar...isn’t it just a copy of her pattern then? Isn’t it something she just controls?”
John smiled. “Yes, but only in the same sense that a flesh body is also an avatar—something we simply control. You see, consciousness, my disembodied friend, is not in the meat. Kali’s consciousness is wherever her pattern recognizer is functioning. It can be mass or it can be energy, but as you and Einstein both know, energy and mass are really the same thing.”
“E=mc2.”
“Exactly. Your pattern recognizer, your consciousness, is what we call your matrix program. It can run on the computer in your brain or in the architecture of a sim, but it cannot run in two places at once.”
A realization suddenly struck me. “Wait. If that’s true, if you die in the real world, you’d be unaffected here, because your matrix would still be operating?”
John nodded. “The matrix in cyber space is really you. When you disconnect from cyberspace and reenter reality, you’re simply taking your conscious awareness—your functioning pattern recognizing machine—your matrix—from one place to another. Do you understand?”
I nodded, taking it all in. “I do.”
“Good,” John replied. “Then you also understand how insidious these sims are and how important it is that we save the people within them.”
“I do,” I repeated. “If you’re right, then we’re just as real as the people in the physical world.”
“It matters not whether the computer is meat or silicon. What matters is the matrix program runs the show. You and tens of thousands of other matrix programs are in danger, and all of those lives are depending on a successful evacuation of this sim.”
“Your destination will be reached in 500 meters,” my car informed us. I’d been so transfixed by John’s explanation that I’d nearly forgotten we were speeding through city streets on our way to another unknown destination. I peered out of the rain-speckled window and saw that we were alongside a massive shopping center. The car took a sharp right and sped up a ramp that took us to the second floor of a parking garage. We turned another corner, hit another ramp, then sped up, back into the rain and stopped on the roof of the parking complex.
Immediately, my eyes were drawn to the spotlights that illuminated the makeshift landing pad on which half a dozen military Chinook helicopters were resting, surrounded by a crowd of more than 5,000 people.
“They’re all conscious, my friend,” John informed me, anticipating my question as the car doors opened, “and all of them in danger. Come with me.”
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