Calculating God

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “They seem to have…well, the word we’ve been using is ‘transcended’ into another level of existence…presumably by uploading themselves into computers.”

  “That’s hardly ‘living forever.’ You might as well be a corpse preserved in formaldehyde.”

  “We presume the uploaded beings continue to exist within the computer, acting and reacting and interacting. Indeed, they might not even be able to tell that they don’t have material existence anymore; the sensory experience might be comparable to, or better than, what we’re used to.”

  She sounded incredulous. “And you say whole races have done this?”

  “That’s my theory, yes.”

  “And you think the individual consciousnesses continue on forever inside the computers?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Which means…which means you wouldn’t have to die?”

  “Well, the flesh-and-blood me would die, of course, and I would have no continuity with the uploaded version once the scan had been made. But the uploaded version would remember having been me, and would go on after I’d died. As far as it—or those interacting with it—would be concerned, it would be me. So, yes, if we had access to the technology, in a very real sense I wouldn’t have to die. I assume that one of the big reasons for people uploading themselves was to overcome the limitations imposed by growing old or ill.”

  “This isn’t on the table?” asked Susan. Her heart was pounding; I could feel it. “You really haven’t been offered this?”

  “No,” I said. “Neither the Forhilnors nor the Wreeds know how to do it—and, for that matter, we’re only assuming that this is what really happened to the other races. It seems that every intelligent species either destroys itself shortly after discovering nuclear weapons, or that it survives maybe a hundred and fifty years longer, but then decides to transcend.”

  Susan lifted her shoulders. “If it were on the table—if it was something you were being offered right now—my response might be different. You know that…” She trailed off, but I knew she’d been about to say that she’d do anything to keep from losing me. I squeezed her hand.

  “But,” she continued, “if it weren’t for that, if it weren’t for what we’re facing, I’d say no. I can’t imagine it being something I’d want.”

  “You’d live forever,” I said.

  “No, I’d exist forever. That’s not the same thing.”

  “It could all be simulated, of course. Every aspect of life.”

  “If it isn’t real,” said Susan, “it isn’t the same.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to tell that it wasn’t real.”

  “Perhaps not,” Susan said. “But I’d know it wasn’t, and that would make all the difference.”

  I shrugged a little. “Ricky seems just as happy playing Nintendo baseball as he is playing the real game—in fact, he plays the computer version more often; I don’t think his generation is going to have the conceptual problems with this that we do.” I paused. “A virtual existence does have its appeals. You wouldn’t have to grow old. You wouldn’t have to die.”

  “I like growing and changing.” She frowned. “I mean, sure, I sometimes wish I still had the body I’d had when I was eighteen, but I’m mostly content.”

  “Civilization after civilization seems to decide to do this.”

  Susan frowned. “You say they either upload themselves or blow themselves up?”

  “Apparently. Hollus said his people faced the same sort of nuclear crisis we’re still facing.”

  “Maybe they decide they have no choice but to trade reality for a simulation, then. If, say, the U.S. and China were to go to war, we’d all probably die, and the human race would be over. But if this were all a simulation, and things went bad, you could just reset the simulation and go on existing. Maybe unreal existence is the only long-term hope for violent races.”

  That was certainly an intriguing thought. Maybe you didn’t outgrow your desire to blow each other up. Maybe it was inevitable that some nation, or some group of terrorists, or just some lunatic, would do it; as Hollus had said, the ability to destroy life on a massive scale becomes cheaper, more portable, and more readily available as time goes by. If there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle—whether it’s nuclear bombs, biological weaponry, or some other tool of mass destruction—then perhaps races transcend just as soon as they can, because it’s the only safe thing to do.

  “I wonder what humanity will choose when the time comes?” I said. “Presumably, we’ll have the technology within a century.” No need to state it dramatically; Susan and I were in the same boat on timeframes that long. “You and I won’t live to see it, but Ricky might. I wonder what they will choose to do?”

  Susan was quiet for a few moments. She then started shaking her head slowly back and forth. “I’d love for my son to live forever, but…but I hope he, and everyone, chooses normal existence.”

  I thought about that—about the pain of skinned knees and broken hearts and broken bones; about the risks flesh was susceptible to; about what I’d been going through.

  I doubted there was any way to reverse the decision. If you copied whatever you were into a computer, you presumably couldn’t go back. If the biological version of you continued on, it would have a separate existence from the moment the scan was made. There’d be no way to reintegrate the two versions later on; it would be like trying to force identical twins to inhabit a single body.

  There were no intelligent lifeforms left on any of those six worlds Hollus’s starship had explored. Perhaps all races terminated the biological versions of themselves once the electronic ones were created. Indeed, perhaps that was the only sensible thing to do, preventing any possibility of terrorist disruptions of the virtual world. Of course, at least on Earth, there were those who would never agree to be voluntarily uploaded—the Amish, Luddites, and others. But they might be scanned surreptitiously, moving them into a virtual world indistinguishable from the one they’d left, rather than leaving any flesh-and-blood beings around whose descendants might vandalize the computers.

  I wondered if any of the races that had transcended regretted their decision?

  Susan and I got ready for bed. She eventually drifted off to sleep, but I lay awake, staring at the dark ceiling, envying the Wreeds.

  Shortly after I’d been diagnosed, I’d walked the few blocks from the ROM to the Chapters flagship store on Bloor Street and had bought Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. She outlined the five stages of coming to terms with death: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance; by my own reckoning I was now well into number five, although there were occasional days on which I felt as though I was still mired in number four. Nonetheless, almost everyone went through the stages in the same sequence. Was it surprising, then, that there were stages whole species went through?

  Hunter-gatherer.

  Agriculture or animal husbandry.

  Metallurgy.

  Cities.

  Monotheism.

  An age of discovery.

  An age of reason.

  Atomic energy.

  Space travel.

  An information revolution.

  A flirtation with interstellar voyaging.

  And then—

  And then—

  And then something else.

  As a Darwinian, I’ve spent countless hours explaining to lay-people that evolution doesn’t have a goal, that life is an ever-branching bush, a pageant of shifting adaptations.

  But now, perhaps, it seemed as though there was a goal, a final result.

  The end of biology.

  The end of pain.

  The end of death.

  I was, on some visceral level—an appropriate metaphor, invoking guts and biology and humanity—dead-set against the idea of giving up corporeal existence. Virtual reality was nothing but air guitar writ large. My life had meaning because it was real. Oh, I’m sure I could use a virtual-reality devi
ce to send me on simulated digs, and I could find simulated fossils, including even breakthrough specimens (such as, oh, I don’t know, say, a sequence showing in a thousand graduated steps the change from one species into another…). But it would be meaningless, pointless; I’d just be a glider shooting out of a gun. There’d be no thrill of discovery—the fossils would be there simply because I wanted them to be there. And they would contribute nothing to our real knowledge of evolution. I never know in advance what I will find on a dig—no one knows. But whatever I do find has to fit into that vast mosaic of facts discovered by Buckland and Cuvier and Mantell and Dollo and von Huene and Cope and Marsh and the Sternbergs and Lambe and Park and Andrews and Colbert and the older Russell and the younger, unrelated Russell and Ostrom and Jensen and Bakker and Horner and Weishampel and Dodson and Dong and Zheng and Sereno and Chatterjee and Currie and Brett-Surman and all the rest, pioneers and my contemporaries. It was real; it was part of the shared universe.

  But now, here I was spending most of my time with a virtual-reality simulation. Yes, there was a real flesh-and-blood Hollus somewhere, and yes, I’d even met him. But most of my interactions were with something computer-generated, a cyberghost. One could easily get sucked into an artificial world. Yes, one surely could.

  I hugged my wife, savoring reality.

  * * *

  23

  I

  hadn’t slept well last night or the night before, and I guess the fatigue was getting to me. I’d tried—I had really tried—to be stoic about what I was going through, to keep a stiff upper lip. But today—

  Today…

  It was the golden hour, the hour between the beginning of work at 9:00 A.M. and the opening of the museum to the public at 10:00. Hollus and I were looking at the special exhibit of Burgess Shale fossils: Opabinia and Sanctacaris and Wiwaxia and Anomalocaris and Hallucigenia, lifeforms so bizarre they defied easy categorization.

  And the fossils made me think of Stephen Jay Gould’s book about the Burgess fauna, Wonderful Life.

  And that made me think about the movie Gould was alluding to, the Jimmy Stewart classic, the Yuletide favorite.

  And that made me think about how much I valued my life…my real, actual, flesh-and-blood existence.

  “Hollus,” I said, tentatively, softly.

  His twin eyestalks had been staring at Opabinia’s cluster of five eyes, so unlike anything else in Earth’s past. He swiveled the stalks to look at me.

  “Hollus,” I said again, “I know your race is more advanced than mine.”

  He was motionless.

  “And, well, you must know things that we don’t.”

  “True.”

  “I—you’ve met my wife Susan. You’ve met Ricky.”

  He touched his eyes together. “You have a pleasant family,” he said.

  “I—I don’t want to leave them, Hollus. I don’t want Ricky to grow up without a father. I don’t want Susan to be alone.”

  “That is unfortunate,” agreed the Forhilnor.

  “There must be something you can do—something you can do to save me.”

  “I am sorry, Tom. I really am. But as I said to your son, there is nothing.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, look. I know how these things work. You’ve got some sort of noninterference directive, right? You’re not allowed to change anything here. I understand that, but—”

  “There really is no such directive,” Hollus said. “I would help you if I could.”

  “But you’ve got to know how to cure cancer. With everything you know about DNA and how life works—you’ve got to know how to cure something as simple as cancer.”

  “Cancer plagues my people, too. I told you that.”

  “And the Wreeds? What about the Wreeds?”

  “Them as well. Cancer is, well, a fact of life.”

  “Please,” I said. “Please.”

  “There is nothing I can do.”

  “You have to,” I said. My voice was growing more strident; I hated the way it sounded—but I couldn’t stop. “You have to.”

  “I am sorry,” said the alien.

  Suddenly I was shouting, my words echoing off the glass display cases. “Damn it, Hollus. God damn it. I’d help you if I could. Why won’t you help me?”

  Hollus was silent.

  “I’ve got a wife. And a son.”

  The Forhilnor’s twin voices acknowledged this. “I” “know.”

  “So help me, damn you. Help me! I don’t want to die.”

  “I do not want you to die, either,” said Hollus. “You are my friend.”

  “You’re not my friend!” I shouted. “If you were my friend, you would help me.”

  I expected him to wink out, expected the holographic projection to shut off, leaving me alone with the ancient, dead remnants of the Cambrian explosion. But Hollus stayed with me, calmly waiting, while I broke down and cried.

  Hollus had disappeared for the day around 4:20 in the afternoon, but I stayed late; working in my office. I was ashamed of myself, disgusted at my performance.

  The end was coming; I’d known it for months.

  Why couldn’t I be more brave? Why couldn’t I face it with more dignity?

  It was time to wrap things up. I knew that.

  Gordon Small and I hadn’t spoken for thirty years. We had been good friends in childhood, living on the same street in Scarborough, but we’d had a falling out at university. He felt I had wronged him horribly; I felt he had wronged me horribly. For the first ten years or so after our big fight, I probably thought about him at least once a month. I was still furious about what he’d done to me, and, as I would lie in bed at night, my mind cycling through all the things it could possibly be upset about, Gordon would come up.

  There was a lot of other unfinished business in my life, of course—relationships of all sorts that should be concluded or repaired. I knew that I’d never get around to some of them.

  For instance, there was Nicole, the girl I’d stood up the night of our high-school prom. I’d never been able to tell her why—that my father had gotten drunk and had pushed my mother down the stairs, and that I’d spent that night with her in the emergency department at Scarborough General. How could I tell Nicole that? In retrospect, of course, perhaps I should have just said that my mother had had a fall, and I’d had to take her to the hospital, but Nicole was my girlfriend, and she might have wanted to come to see my mother, so instead I lied and said I’d had car trouble, and I was caught in that lie, and I never was able to explain to her what really happened.

  Then there was Bjorn Amundsen, who had borrowed a hundred dollars from me at university but had never repaid it. I knew he was poor; I knew he wasn’t getting help from his parents, the way I was; I knew he’d been turned down for a scholarship. He needed the hundred more than I did; indeed, he always needed it more than I did, and was never able to pay it back. Stupidly, I’d once made a comment about him being a bad risk. He took to avoiding me rather than have to admit that he could not repay the loan. I’d always thought you couldn’t put a price on friendship, but, in that case, it turned out that I could—and it was a measly hundred bucks. I’d love to apologize to Bjorn, but I had no idea what had become of him.

  And there was Paul Kurusu, a Japanese student in my high school, who once, in a fit of anger, I’d called a racist name—the only time in my life I’d ever done that. He’d looked at me with such hurt; he’d heard similar names from others, of course, but I was supposed to be his friend. I had no idea what had come over me, and I’d always wanted to tell him how sorry I was. But how do you bring something like that up three decades later?

  But Gordon Small was one I had to make peace with. I couldn’t—couldn’t go to my grave with that unresolved. Gordon had moved to Boston in the early ’80s. I called directory assistance. There were three Gordon Smalls listed for Boston, but only one had the middle initial P—and Philip, it came back to me, had been Gordon’s middle name.

  I jotted dow
n the number, dialed nine again for an outside line, dialed my long-distance billing code, then keyed in Gordon’s number. A girl’s voice answered. “Hello?”

  “Hello,” I said. “May I please speak to Gordon Small?”

  “Just a second,” said the girl. Then she shouted out, “Grandpa!”

  Grandpa. He was a grandfather now—a grandfather at fifty-four. This was ridiculous; so much time had passed. I was about to put down the handset when a voice came from the speaker. “Hello?”

  Two syllables, that’s all—but I recognized him at once. The sound brought a flood of memories rushing back.

  “Gord,” I said, “it’s Tom Jericho.”

  There was startled silence for a few seconds, and then, frosty, “Ah.”

  He didn’t slam down the phone, at least. Maybe he was thinking that someone had died—a mutual friend, someone he’d want to know about, someone who meant enough to both of us that I’d set aside our differences to let him know about the funeral, someone from the old gang, the old neighborhood.

  But he didn’t say anything else. Just “ah.” And then he waited for me to get on with it.

  Gordon was in the States now, and I knew the American media well: once an alien had appeared on U.S. soil—there was that Forhilnor who had been haunting the San Francisco courts, and another visiting the psychiatric hospital in Charleston—no mention would be made of anything outside of America; if Gordon knew about Hollus and me, he gave no sign.

  I’d rehearsed what I’d wanted to say, of course, but his tone—the coldness, the hostility—left me tongue-tied. Finally, I blurted out, “I’m sorry.”

  He could have taken that any number of ways: sorry to bother you, sorry to have interrupted what you were doing, sorry to hear about whatever your current sadness is, sorry that an old friend is dead—or, of course, as I meant it: sorry for what had happened, for the wedge we’d driven between ourselves all those decades past. But he wasn’t going to make this easy for me. “For what?” he said.

  I exhaled, probably quite noisily, into the mouthpiece. “Gord, we used to be friends.”