Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  “Brunhilde, ye say, Morag? Thass an unusual name, these days. Well, well, never mind. Nice te see that Rosko’s got hisself a girlfriend.”

  CHAPTER 13

  PHILOSOPHICAL ZOMBIES

  Murakami called it panpsychism. Lorna called it nutty. Morag—who’d already given him a three-minute version of the I’iwa’s seventy-thousand-year history, told him exactly what she thought the Number might be, and shown him a video clip of Roy Powers that she’d grabbed aboard the Goddess of the Oceans—was getting impatient.

  Psyche was Greek for “soul.” Or “spirit,” or “mind”—just different words for the same corner of the universe that scientists found so embarrassing. Which was why so many of them insisted that the universe was, all evidence to the contrary, pure dead matter. Panpsychism was almost the opposite theory, he told them, scuffing at the mud with the toe of his boot: it was the idea that mind, or psyche, pervaded everything in the universe, the way gravity pervaded everything. Many people had believed it, in the past, including some of the greatest thinkers ever, but it had been out of fashion the past couple of centuries. And now at last he had the equations to prove it. As so often in science, the biggest blind spot was the biggest clue.

  “The structure of the Substrate—”

  “The Murakami Field,” Morag interrupted.

  “The structure of the Murakami Field, if you insist, appears to violate the law of conservation of energy. An extremely rude thing for a physical theory to do. But there is no violation. Only energy leakage between parallel universes.”

  “Only that,” Kit said flatly. “You make sound pretty normal. Like, this energy leaking from one universe to other universe is happen all time.”

  “Oh, I assure you it is! Energy is leaking in and out of this universe, right now, from inside your head.”

  “But”—she gestured at the house, the grass, the fence—“you are really saying universe itself is conscious?”

  He held up the green-handled pruning shears and snapped the blades open and shut. “I don’t think you have to give up pruning roses on humanitarian grounds, if that’s what you mean. But the Field is universal, yes. We’ve been fixated on this puzzle that our brains have a special property called consciousness. But it’s the universe that has the special property. Our embodied brains just happen to be good at tuning in to it.”

  “But,” Morag said, “what does that have to do with—”

  His sense of what the puzzle was, and his real career in science, had begun on his twelfth birthday. Hamamatsu, Shizuoka prefecture: he’d broken some trivial rule on the playground, and when he dared ask why the rule mattered, one of the teachers—his science teacher, as it happened—actually slapped him across the face, as if to wake him from his infuriating stupidity: “Because that’s how it has to be!”

  That’s how it has to be—it was the tribe-defining battle cry of the unimaginative. Back in class, where he sat behind the largest boy and tried not to get caught either reading under the desk or looking bored, he thought: What does it mean to say that the world is made up only of physical objects? And how could it be true, when his slapped jaw was one of those objects but the stinging sensation in his jaw (or in his brain, or in his mind) was not? If some future science, not yet known, looked as bizarre to us as black holes and gravity waves would have looked to Galileo, wouldn’t that science refer to things that didn’t sound physical to us at all?

  He’d already read a fat, college-level history of science, so he knew this had happened before. Where was radioactivity, in Galileo’s thinking? Where was curved space, in Newton’s? And quantum mechanics—ha! (He was just beginning to get a grip on it, reading Heisenberg under that school desk while his teacher offered them an incompetent explanation of the periodic table.) Quantum mechanics was a beautiful, high-precision predicting device—but nobody understood it, and it was maggoty with paradox, and the dirty secret was that physicists, who were supposed to worship at the altar of evidence, kept changing their minds over the decades about what it even meant, the way they changed their preference for baggy or skinny trousers. So maybe, he thought, there was room for something radically new in physics that would make sense of the sting in his jaw.

  He placed the pruning shears in the crook of his arm and attended to the drop of blood on the end of his thumb.

  Of course the rose garden Daniel had seen in his mind was not in Kyoto after all—and the roses weren’t in bloom either, because it was a raw day in November, with clouds like dirty sheep being herded south out of Canada on a damp breeze. But the famous Hideo Murakami was exactly as he’d pictured—short and slight, dark-skinned, with pale crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes and an optimistic wisp of hair slicked down like a pencil line over the bald dome of his head. And at least it was clear why the scene had seemed so familiar to him—they were half a mile down the hill from his parents’ old house, in the Eislers’ backyard.

  Natazscha Cerenkov stood with her head bowed and the collar of a cheap rain jacket pinched at the neck. Kit hugged Morag, for warmth as much as comfort. Daniel was feeling the chill too, standing there in a thin T-shirt (“HAPPY! HAPPY! HAPPY!”) he’d picked from a random pile on the ship. But he stood with his hands in his pockets, ignoring the temperature even as the wind stiffened. A few drops of rain began to come down. Murakami seemed not to notice. Rosko hugged Sakura, the girl with the sign.

  Sakura was Murakami’s daughter. They’d been in Seattle for weeks already, ever since Kyoto burned. Sakura’s mother had become a Seraphim convert after reading Anabasis, tried to drag her husband and daughter to meetings, then abandoned them and disappeared. Later, she turned up in Osaka, one of the several dozen white-scarved corpses in the rubble of the Horyu-ji temple.

  In Kyoto, the Seraphim began a campaign of burning not just libraries, bookstores, and university research facilities, but temples too, because they were full of old manuscripts and “the past must be wiped from people’s minds.” That had been a step too far, and riots began: red-robed monks, blue-skirted schoolgirls, and baggy-eyed salarymen, all fighting back. The Seraphim, forced into a temporary retreat, set fire to the buildings they’d taken over. The fire services weren’t working, of course. The Murakami house was in Shugakuin, up against the hills in the northeast corner of the city. Wind drove the flames that way, and Hideo and Sakura had had to escape uphill through the forest, afraid that they too would burn.

  Murakami thought it made sense to go to a lab where he hoped he “might be permitted to take up space.” He was familiar with Balakrishnan’s famous Institute, and David Maynard Jones’s work, so he got himself and Sakura on one of the last commercial flights from Tokyo to Seattle.

  “Unfortunately,” Natazscha said, “things are no better here. More than half the population has either joined the Seraphim and left, or they’ve left because they’re afraid of what will happen next. The Institute was firebombed, and the university has closed down, so Professor Murakami never did get his lab space. We were talking about leaving the city too, so it’s a good thing you got back when you did.”

  “What about Derek Partridge?” Daniel asked. “Rosko, you’re driving his van.”

  “He stayed in town after you guys left. He and Ella became inseparable—major bonding over astronomy. Like father and daughter, or grandfather and granddaughter anyway. But we’d been saying we needed better information on what the Seraphim are doing, and they took that literally. He packed Ella’s truck with camping gear, threw Brunhilde’s keys at me, and said, ‘Use it, we’re headed for the mountains.’”

  “I tried to stop them,” Natazscha said. “Derek’s a tough old bird, but he’s over seventy.”

  “And you not hear from them?” Kit asked.

  “Texts, at first. Now, nothing.”

  “OK, OK,” Morag said to Murakami, trying again to get them back on track. “So what you’ve said is consistent with what Daniel’s been telling me—or with what Iona was trying to communicate to Daniel. The Architects
wanted to live forever, preserve themselves forever. Just like humans do. Only, they actually had the tech to do something about it. ‘Welcome to the dimension of the eternal,’ blah blah. The thing is, how the hell are we going to—”

  But Daniel interrupted her. “This is about time, isn’t it? Consciousness depends on living in time. And the Architects placed themselves outside of time.”

  “I think you had a foot in that door yourself, Daniel,” Murakami said. “How did you put it—‘experiences without an experiencer’? Just so. My theory implies that anyone who tried this would not achieve the personal immortality people imagine and long for; instead they’d become a sort of centerless experience engine. Consuming other people’s experiences, as they do, would be something like eating candy or taking a drug. Enjoyable. Desirable. But instantly forgotten and endlessly in need of replenishment. There has to be some vestige of consciousness left behind—some collective proto-mind we can’t understand—but that mind needs what it left behind. So it wants us, as food if you like, but it also wants to use us, to climb back through the trapdoor.”

  Was Roy Powers an Architect, then? Were all the people who had vanished from the various events actually re-embodied Architects? Murakami said he wasn’t sure, and pointed to the images of Powers on the tablet.

  “This is just a representation, yes? But if you’ve never seen the technology before, you might be fooled into thinking it’s really him, magically miniaturized and imprisoned in a flat box.”

  “Happens,” Lorna said. “Not that often, now. But tribes where they’ve never seen photography, they can find it terrifyin’.”

  “So put yourself in their shoes,” Murakami said. “Suppose I have such advanced technology that instead of grabbing some video of Mr. Powers, I can ‘take a picture’ of him by creating a walking, talking, three-dimensional representation of him—using solid matter instead of pixels.”

  “An android?” Rosko offered.

  “A walking, talking, three-dimensional simulacrum. Something that is not him, but seems identical. And then the question arises: How do we know that this thing is conscious—or that it isn’t?”

  “If something looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck—” Lorna began.

  “With the right technology, Dr. Chen, it could be nothing more than a perfect simulation of a duck.”

  “So,” Rosko said, “if Powers is a re-embodied Architect, we don’t know whether he’s conscious or just a full-blown philosophical zombie.”

  “A what?”

  “A ‘person’ who’s indistinguishable in every way from a real live human being, but not conscious.”

  “Nothing inside!” Murakami said, almost gleefully. “A mind, in its body, is like a gift wrapped in paper. A mystery! You touch it, and rattle it, and try to guess what’s inside. But the mind is a permanent mystery. The paper can never be removed.”

  Morag actually plucked the shears out of his hand in frustration. “Great. OK. But like I said five interruptions ago, what the eff does this have to do with the Number? With actually having a plan of attack? How are we going to undo the bastards before it’s too late?”

  “Aha!” Murakami said. He saw Kit shiver, and seemed to notice the weather for the first time. “Let’s go inside, and Rosko can introduce you to our new friend Erwin.”

  CHAPTER 14

  NOT BY METAL . . .

  The Eislers’ house had a messy, camped-in feel. The power and heat had been out for more than a week, so it was barely warmer inside than out. Furniture had been pushed aside. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink, which smelled of old food. Pillows and blankets lay in a pile on one end of the couch. Stefan Eisler’s basement workshop was the tidiest, most normal-looking space in the house—if you made allowances for the bizarre-looking contraption on the big wooden worktable.

  Morag thought of the sixteen black monoliths they’d seen, inert in their air-conditioned chamber, on the second floor at the Institute for the Study of the Origin of Consciousness. That was “Mr. Turing,” as Iona’s nerds had nicknamed their pet machine. It was one of the most powerful computers ever built, and Carl Bates had thought he could use it to master the age-old dream of forever by digitizing and uploading the contents of his own mind. But Carl hadn’t known about the Field, and Mr. Turing had gone the way of the abacus and the slide rule now. A relic. A museum piece. Here in front of them was the evidence—and there was something almost offensive, almost absurd, about the evidence being this messy, homemade contraption.

  The new World’s Most Powerful Computer resembled bad art more than any computer she’d ever seen. In a gallery, it would have been called a mixed-media conceptual installation, the title would have been At the Center’s Edge: New Dreams of Chaos in the Basement of Creation, and the little curator’s card on the wall would have described it as “a daring new engagement with the psychodynamics of Otherness.” There were a couple of keyboards and screens, and a few coyly winking LEDs, but the rest could have been a dismembered washing machine thrown into a junkyard. Cables everywhere. Small mirrors. A fan. Something that might have been half a pair of binoculars on an adjustable stand. Twenty or thirty feet of what appeared to be chrome muffler pipe, attached to pressure gauges that might have been stolen from a submarine. There were several loose circuit boards too, dense nerve bundles of ultra-thin multicolored wiring, and a central metal cylinder that might contain liquid nitrogen and a hopeful billionaire’s head. At one end, an orange extension cord (ten dollars at the hardware store) snaked away to a wall outlet.

  “I know,” Murakami said, sensing Morag’s reaction. “Ridiculous. But early computers were a mess too. We’ve had no time to make it pretty, so for now this is what a top-of-the-line quantum computer looks like. Don’t be fooled. Erwin is a thousand-qubit machine that actually works.”

  “And qubits is—never mind,” Kit said. She remembered Rosko trying to explain it before. “You name machine after Schrödinger, yah? Famous German guy with half-dead cat?”

  “Austrian,” Morag corrected. Kit rolled her eyes.

  “A great German-speaking scientist,” Rosko said. “Interested in everything, came up with one of the all-time great equations, and hated the Nazis. What’s not to like?”

  “You missed an important item on his résumé,” Murakami said. “Schrödinger also suspected that consciousness pervaded the universe. So my nutty theories have powerful friends.”

  “I don’t care about the history,” Morag said. “Will it work?”

  Rosko rummaged in a stack of printed documents, pulled one out, and handed it to her. “It’ll work. But you need to start with Uma Chaudry’s message.”

  “That came to me in Kyoto,” Murakami said. “One of the last messages I received.”

  FROM: Uma Chaudry, Interagency Directorate for Advanced Computation, Bangalore

  SUBJECT: THE ARCHITECTS AND ROUTE TWO: AN EXIT STRATEGY

  I send this message, and the attached documents, to the few who will be able to understand them—and, perhaps, act on them in time.

  The survival of humanity is now at stake. I do not speak of something as trivial as a great war, from the ruins of which civilization might be rebuilt, but of extinction.

  As you know, the world’s major governments have been focused for some years on a threat that is barely part of ordinary people’s awareness—cyber-warfare. The success of the United States in using software to attack Iran’s nuclear program demonstrated that history’s next great conquest would be made not by metal, but by code.

  In such an environment, being the first to master the technique known as quantum computation has become an urgent strategic priority, for a fully realized quantum computer would offer a power advantage beyond any general’s dreams. What use the biggest aircraft carriers, and the best missiles, if all your encryption systems, and therefore all your communications, are transparent? What use the hardware, if the enemy can render it electronically inert, or even take it over and use it against you, at the touch of a
button?

  These concerns have loomed large, then, in the dull minds of our political and military leaders. But the arrival of the Architects confirms a suspicion in comparison to which these matters of strategic power are quaint indeed.

  Religion’s dream of immortality (Route One, as we have come to say—a gift that the gods will bestow on us only if we prove worthy) seems entirely different from our more recent dream of immortality through digital technology. But we now know that our “gods,” as featured so magnificently in the first dream, appeared to us as gods precisely because they were the first creatures in the universe to achieve the second dream, Route Two.

  Who or what these “Architects” were originally—physically—I do not believe we will ever know. But what matters now is their fear that we are on the cusp of repeating their great advance. They must destroy us, as no doubt they have destroyed countless other species on other worlds, before we can become their competitors.

  Pause for a moment to savor the irony. Thousands of years ago, in the Babel story and elsewhere, our religious texts warned us of precisely this fate: if we became too powerful, and thus a threat to the gods themselves, they would destroy us. And let me be brutally frank: in the coming, final Babel, most of humanity has no hope of survival. Thousands are dying now, in the so-called events. Soon it will be millions, then tens of millions. Then, perhaps, everyone.

  The only good news I have for you is this: because of breakthroughs recently made, it may be possible to save some few of us. We have made strides toward a technology that is powerful enough at last to fulfill the Route Two dream. And in this way a few of the most suitable human minds, those of the Babblers, can be preserved forever.

  As I write, I am preparing my own grandchildren for this survival. If I am successful, they may become the first human immortals.