"Get me the rest of the family," Jules cried loudly. "We don't have to put up with this shit. I'm calling a family moot."
"Are you insane?" I jumped to my feet. "Somebody has maneuvered six of the twelve of us into one tidy location, and you think it would be a good idea to bring the other six along as well?"
"Take it easy, Tiger," Jan said. No, it wasn't Jan, it was her tattoo interface which now hung next to my ear, small wings beating in a humming blur.
Too late, anyway. Juni stepped onto the life-support platform clad in oatmeal-colored slacks and blouse and decorated in elaborate gold around her neck and arms worked to an Aztec theme.
"I hope you all got your invitations," she cried gaily. She glanced around, finding her moorings, settled unerringly on Jules. "Naughty boy, are you trying to preempt my T-party? And why are those lazy lumps sleeping on the floor?"
Marchmain came through naked and deeply tanned, as usual, saw Toby and Ember in the same moment. His penetrating gaze flicked around the garden, settled immediately on me. "They've been hurt?"
"They're recovering nicely now," I said. "Small accident with a nuclear weapon."
His mouth quirked. "That has to smart." But he was impressed, and worried. "It sounds as if the despoilers are coming after us in a big way. We haven't seen anything like this in four hundred years. People, what the hell are we doing cooped up together in such a time?"
"Jules thought it sounded like a fun idea," Maybelline said sarcastically.
Jan said, "We're in the M-Brain on close orbit around the Xon star. As far as I can tell, we're here to bring the kid or back him up in the clinches."
Ruth and Septima had joined us. Voices mingled and rose. Some laughter. Septima, in matte-black battle dress, crouched beside Toby, reassuring herself.
"Where's Avril?" Ruth asked in a crusty tone. "And I don't see Decius. Too wrapped up with their household gods, I dare say."
"Listen up," I said. "Everyone. That means you."
To my surprise, the voices fell silent. Many eyes peered at me.
"I assume you all realize that we're on the M-Brain platform. The computronium shells are blocking the Xon radiation. Jules brought me here when I first met him. He ushered me through a sort of virtual-reality parable, but he didn't understand it himself. I told you to shut up," I said to him. "Take us all there now, Jules."
He looked ready to do me serious damage with his large hands, but the rest of the family were regarding him with interest and a touch of hostility.
"Oh shit, all right."
The tropical garden went away. We hung in an electric-blue mist. Two doors presented themselves, one silver, the other forest green. Jules raised his arm chest high, index finger forward, murmured an instruction. Like a flock of ungainly birds of mismatched plumage, eight conscious Seebecks flew forward and plunged through the green door.
People jostled us on every side. I knew that it was no more than a simulation generated by some tiny fraction of the M-Brain intelligence, but the ripe odor of human bodies, their sweat, their farts, their belching, the fur, wool, cotton, synthetics of their diverse garments, the braying and bleating animals some of them were herding, the entire immense cacophony persuaded my senses that this was real nor was I out of it.
"Do you mind?" Juni was jostled by a troupe of Scouts laden with backpacks and folded-up tents. One threw her a mocking two-finger salute of apology. A Cretan whore in saucy bull-dancing regalia shrieked imprecations at a customer in a late-twentieth-century deep-blue pinstriped stockbroker's suit, jacket hanging across his shoulder from one finger, wide yellow suspenders over blue shirt with white collar, accusing him of impotence and preference for infants. I didn't believe a word she said. A family of Chinese peasants carried three rather starved-looking chickens. Two very dark-skinned men wrestled ferociously while other black-purple fellows clapped, clicked their tongues and whistled. Children were everywhere underfoot, many of them naked. Women stared at Marchmain's own nakedness, covered their faces or their eyes, or pretended to. The noise was like an Asian marketplace in the middle of a railway station next to a busy airport.
Over our heads, layer upon layer of transparent flooring echoed the same scene into final opacity. A huge digital counter showed that the number of humans in this place was in excess of eighty-four billion and climbing every second.
"All the people who've ever lived in my world, isn't that what you said it was, Jules?"
"Your mediocre history," he said haughtily.
I nodded. "And consequently a fair representation of the history of most human-inhabited cognate worlds, right?"
The others were gazing about, mostly in distaste. Juni said, "This is exactly the kind of thing I spend my time avoiding. Can we go now? Have you made your point?"
I looked at Jules; he shrugged, pointed his finger. We stood at the silver door, which opened. Night stretched beyond it.
Now it was apparent to the body as well as to the mind that we entered a simulation, a diorama. Not even Vorpal flesh might be sustained here in the vacuum of open, aching space.
The Galaxy wheeled beyond us, jewelry made of light flung upon purest darkness. Stars in clotted streamers of brilliance. Hundreds of billions of stars. And beyond this great four-spoked wheel, hundreds of billions of galaxies more, themselves no brighter than individual stars, stretching to the curved unending edges of the universe. And beyond this inconceivably immense and pressing universe, more, and more, and yet more universes...
"So much life," Septima said in a voice like a groan of pain. "So much suffering."
"Don't be a spoilsport," Juni said. For a mad moment I expected her burst into song. Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. But maybe they didn't have that movie in her chosen world's history. Or if they did, there was no record of it, since no record of anything at all remained there after the nanothings ate every living creature.
"That'll do, thank you," I told Jules. He bit his lip, made it go away. We stood again in the garden of the Matrioshka Brain, swaying slightly. It is hard to be snatched back from a vision of the open cosmos in its fertile glory.
"The Reverent Jules tried to persuade me that this comparison was an argument for the imminent extinction of all human life within a century and a half. How probable is the second scenario, the entire galaxy fated to be filled with life—and yet we find ourselves only at the upper end of the first scenario? It's preposterously improbable that any given observer should exist as early as we do in the history of a colonized cosmos. Ergo, it's going to be empty. Ergo, we're screwed, or humanity is, and fairly soon. Ergo, presumably, that's what the Contest is all about."
"Find the flaw in the argument, that's all I say," Jules said angrily. "Better minds than yours, little brother, find the Doomsday argument quite convincing."
"I'm not interested in your sloppy logic," I said. "The M-Brain showed this to us for an entirely different reason, I think. The whole thing is a kind of pun. A Zen paradox."
I remembered a martial arts teacher, Sensei Roger, who clouted me over the head whenever I drew away from the moment into abstractions. He didn't object to thinking, to planning, to analyzing, he wasn't one of those New Age idiots who despise the intellect. He was a holist in the best sense of the word.
"Yeah, yeah," Jan said. "What pun?"
"It's a simulation of simulations."
Ember groaned, sat up, touched his face and neck with tentative fingers. "Why don't I feel like shit?" I crossed to him, leaned down, held out a hand to help him to his feet. "Oh yeah. You did that magic thing." I detected a touch of scorn creeping back into his tone. He glanced once at Toby—whole, still asleep, snoring faintly—and ignored him thereafter.
"My pleasure," I said flatly, releasing his grip once he got up. "Next time try not to stand so close to the fireball."
He laughed without conspicuous enjoyment. "Did I hear someone talking about simulations?"
"The kid thinks we're dreaming," Maybelline said, no longer any friendlier tha
n she'd been when I knocked on her bedroom door.
"God preserve me from newbies," Septima added. "It's like a catalog of the obvious, as if none of us has ever thought about this before. Your friend Dr. Katha Sarit Sagara leaped to the same conclusion half a century ago, as I recall. Of course she was a small child at the time."
"Uh-huh," I said. I did feel a tad discomfited, but pressed on. There was too much systematic evasion among these people, I couldn't assume that they really had faced the probabilities of this ridiculous set-up. "Maybe why she specialized in ontology and, what was it, reality engineering?"
"Entirely different," Custodial Superiore Septima told me, tight-lipped.
"Why don't we all sit down?" I said. Courteously, the M-Brain provided nine comfortable padded armchairs arranged in a circle with a glass-topped table in the middle. Light refreshments of a Middle Eastern flavor filled a dozen bowls. Pita bread steamed. I took the seat nearest to me, filled my glass with sparkling water, sipped a little to wet my throat, tore off a piece of bread, and dipped it in hummus. "I can recommend this, it's delicious," I said.
After a moment's shuffling, the eight other Seebecks not sleeping on the floor or communing with deities set themselves down with an ill grace. Jan cheered up after a moment as she started to shovel food into her mouth.
"Well?"
"The world behind the green door is any standard cognate of Tegmark level one. Toby took me and Lune on a tour of the levels, including a quick jaunt to a number of places on the first level. I know what they're like. Variants on the place I come from—or think I come from. Ten to the 1029 of them, I think Lune said. Lots."
"Yes, yes." Maybelline was impatient. "And Tegmark two mixes up the physical constants and number of dimensions, and the third level is the quantum superposition hyperspace—"
"10118 universes, all jammed on top of each other," Ember said. The extravagance seemed to please him.
"—and level four is the place we can't go, or can't stay, at any rate.
Jan shuddered, pulled a face. "Numbers, emptiness, the place where the Tree has its roots."
"All right," I said. "Let's just think about it for a moment. And of course, we can't. We can visit one sample or another, but our minds are too small to touch even a fraction of it. I mean, let's also just forget levels two, three, and four—the base level itself might as well be infinite."
Someone coughed. I turned my head. Toby was sitting up, face white, expression uncertain. I got out of my chair and crouched beside him.
"Feeling okay?"
"Terrible dream. Terrible." He looked around, sniffed. "You're eating. I'm glad you didn't wait for me."
I laughed, helping him to his feet. There was a spare place waiting for him at the table that hadn't been there before. Was all this a simulation as well? No, I decided. And yes, at the same time. If everything was a simulation, why make the distinction?
"I'm glad to see you recovered, brother," Septima said to him across the table. She was eating cold stuffed vine leaves, licking her lips. A carafe of something, probably retsina, stood at her right hand. "I don't know what you've been telling the boy, but he's developed the conviction that we're all asleep and dreaming. He can't decide if it is the case of an emperor dreaming that he is a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that it's the emperor."
"I can't blame him," Toby said. "I've wondered the same thing myself. Tell me, did I dream that I was burnt to death in a nuclear explosion? Not the sort of thing one would imagine one might be confused about."
"Forget the metaphysics for a moment," I said. "I'm talking about the scale of the thing. You people seem to think you're gods or the nearest classical approximation. Just because you can zap from place to—"
"Now see here—"
"What nonsense. None of us thinks for a moment—"
"Yes, that's a fair approximation."
Everyone stopped their protestations and stared at Toby.
"Really, Toby, don't be absurd."
"Ruth, there is nothing absurd about it. We're the Players! The Tegmark Tetragrammaton is the arena for the Contest. Doesn't that make you feel..." He cleared his throat, reached for a glass of water.
"Divine? I always feel divine, darling," Juni said. "I must say, Jules, you've put on a very nice spread here. Simple but elegant. And speaking of which, let's drop this dreary metaphysical nonsense and talk about my T-party."
"Your Tegmark parties are always fun, sweetie," Jan said. "But I think we do owe August a hearing. Where were you headed with all this?"
"I've been trying to work out what sort of mad universe contains people like you and me. It's as if I woke up one day and found myself in the middle of a mythological story. And I don't believe in mythology. Great-aunt Tansy did, and she wasn't even real." I stumbled to a stop, shook my head. "Shit, it's impossible to talk sensibly about this sort of thing. Look, my point is really very simple. This Matrioshka Brain is obviously capable of creating virtualities, simulations if you like, that feel to us exactly like the real world."
"Except that they're not," Marchmain drawled. "They have nothing behind them, or inside them. They are cartoons. The K-machines are not cartoons. Neither am I. Don't think you are, either."
"No, of course not, not in that sense." I looked around the table at them, and remembered the Round Table imagery in the locked room at the bottom of the stairs that weren't there in Toby's small cottage. Again, I had the teasing sense of an idea nibbling at the edge of my mind. I paused, waited for it to approach. It skittered away. "The point is, a sufficiently advanced intelligence—maybe even more advanced than this terrifying thing we're sitting inside—could create a simulated world as dense and complex and real to its inhabitants as any T-1 world I've been in."
"An article of faith," Marchmain said dismissively. "No proof."
"For Christ's sake, it's an article of your faith," I said. "You lot are constantly babbling about computational reality and computational ontology, Lune has written a whole book about it."
"Entirely different," Ember said. "That's physics, not metaphysics. You need to take a course or two at the Zuse Institution. In fact, we have to get you signed up."
I drew a deep breath. I wanted to abuse them as mindless automatons, but all that would have got me was a series of canned responses from mindless automatons, or a close approximation. I said, "Suppose I'm right, though. Suppose in even one universe a technology eventually develops that's capable of emulating living beings, people with minds and feelings and histories. Just give me that premise."
"I'll stipulate that," Toby said.
"In my world—in the world that Dramen and Angelina abandoned me in—the geeks were starting to talk about something called Moore's law."
"Yes," Ruth said, looking faintly interested, "shorthand for an accelerating pace of technological change in computing power."
"Right. And a few people pushed that argument to the limit." I'd read a book about it, over the top but hard to debunk. If computing power kept plunging in price but doubling in magnitude every year or two, as it had been doing for decades, then it was going to hit a wall by the middle of the century. No, not a wall, a huge upward slope of ceaseless change and innovation. The Eschaton, the guy had called it.
"You're talking about singularity," Ruth said. "It never happened."
I stared at her incredulously. "Never? You walk from one speck in one universe to the next, from one tiny part of one Tegmark level to another, and you feel entirely certain that you know their limits. You're completely sure that not one of the billions of worlds in those billions of universes has ever evolved a technological culture that reached this stage... what you call singularity. You just know this, do you?"
"Don't speak to me like that! Show some respect."
I leaned back in my chair, rubbed my face. "Sorry, Ruth. I'm just getting very impatient. The logic seems so obvious to me. Any sufficiently advanced technological society must have the capacity to simulate anything it wants to, down to
whatever level of fine... I dunno... call it granularity. And if it can do that once, won't be long before it's able to do so as often as it wants. So how many simulated universes can dance on the head of the pin? As many as the gods wish to create."
"I've said it before," Septima said, "you seem to believe this is a brand-sparkling-new line of thought. You think we're fools? This is dealt with and refuted in Ontological Engineering 101. Well, 201."
I felt my face flush. I turned in my chair so that I sat sideways to the table and said, "May I speak to the Ra Egg?"
A beautifully outfitted butler in white gloves bowed slightly. "How may I be of service, Sir?"
"Please don't call me 'Sir'," I said. "I'm August."
"Certainly, August."
"Can you simulate a planet full of people? Not just pretty pictures—real conscious entities?"
The butler was shocked in a very refined way. "In principle, August, certainly. But we would never do it."
"So we're not simulated in that sense?"
"By no means. You are as real as the Ra Egg, and exceptionally handsome, if I may say so, Sir." Was that the ghost of a smile?
"Yeah, yeah." Already my mood was improving. "What would stop you?"
"Fundamental ethical considerations, August. To emulate a human-grade mind is, eo ipso, to create a person. Such a person, if inserted into a simulated universe, would be living a lie. Moreover, such a person could not ethically be deleted."
I frowned. "Pretty much my own conclusion. Thank you for confirming it." I looked around the table; nobody seemed ready to butt in, and they were all looking interested, even Juni. I decided not to stretch my artful pause any farther. "So how real is the Ra Egg?"
K-Machines Page 22
