by Mark Alpert
Her voice trails off. Mom’s been suffering from depression for years, so I know about her rough patches. But I still haven’t forgiven her for missing the funeral.
My circuits come up with more words to fill the silence. “Don’t be concerned, Mrs. Armstrong. We all have—”
“Stop it! Just stop!” Her voice rings in my acoustic sensors. She glares at me, her face reddening.
I want to step backward, but the office is small and my Quarter-bot’s torso is already against the wall. Instead, I raise my steel hands in a calming gesture. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“Stop calling me Mrs. Armstrong!” She’s breathing hard. Her chest is heaving. “I know you’re in there, Adam!”
She sounds hysterical. That’s a symptom of her depression. She lashes out when she feels like she’s losing control.
But she said my name. And after a couple of seconds, she takes a step toward me. We’re less than two feet apart.
She stretches her hand toward my torso and actually pokes my armor. “Where are you? Where’s your brain?” Her voice is quieter now, but still agitated. “Where are your wires? It’s doesn’t make sense to me, but they told me that you’re in there.”
“My control unit is here.” I point at the middle of my torso. “That’s where my memories are stored and my thoughts are processed.”
Mom reaches to where I’m pointing and presses her palm to the steel. It’s like she’s feeling for a heartbeat. “They told me your soul was in there too. In the wires.”
“Uh, who is this ‘they’ you’re talking about?”
She lets out a tired sigh. “Adam, I know you’re not religious. I know you think my faith is stupid and childish.”
“No, I don’t—”
“But it’s not stupid. I had a dream last night. I dreamed that I went to heaven and started looking for you there. I saw a pair of beautiful angels and asked them where you were. And they said you weren’t in heaven. They said you were in this machine.” She raps her knuckles twice against my armor, as if trying to get me to answer.
I’m stunned. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. For a whole year I’ve been trying to convince Mom that I’m still alive. But she wouldn’t believe it until she saw a couple of angels in a dream. “It’s true. I’m in the wires.”
She nods. After a few more seconds she takes her hand off my torso and points at the cameras in my head. “And you can see me, Adam?” Her voice drops to a whisper. “You can really see me?”
My circuits are roiling. They’re full of joy and sadness and wonder and loss. It occurs to me that maybe this wasn’t a random dream. The programmers spoke to Brittany in her sleep, so couldn’t they have spoken to Mom too? Maybe they planted this blessed idea in her mind. Perhaps to reward me for saving their program.
Or maybe not. Maybe it was really angels. But it doesn’t matter, does it? I’m happy either way.
“Yes, I can see you.” I reach toward her with my steel fingers and clasp her warm hand. “You’re my mother.”
Author’s Note
The Real Science Behind The Silence
This book began as a ghost story. I told it for the first time on a beach in Delaware while sitting around a bonfire with some friends. Like a lot of ghost stories, what makes this one really frightening is that it might be true.
It’s called the simulation hypothesis. A few years ago I read a description of it written by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University. The hypothesis proposes that our whole world might be a super-advanced computer simulation created by superintelligent beings. This kind of virtual world would be so detailed that it would simulate the inner lives of all its billions of virtual people. Each simulated person would be a fully conscious artificial intelligence with a wide range of thoughts and emotions, exactly like those of a biological human being. And if the simulated world is sufficiently realistic, its virtual inhabitants wouldn’t even realize they’re living inside a computer.
Although the idea sounds bizarre, we’re currently building the technology for it. We already have computer simulations that can predict the weather and the stock market. Other programs simulate battlefields (like Call of Duty) or ordinary domestic life (like The Sims). And our phones are equipped with artificial intelligences such as Siri, which can answer questions and tell bad jokes. Hundreds of years from now, if technological progress continues at its current pace, our computers will definitely be powerful enough to hold virtual worlds and billions of AIs.
But Bostrom argues that these miraculous advances may have occurred already. His argument is based on two assumptions:
1. There’s at least a small chance that human civilization can survive the catastrophic threats facing it—global warming, nuclear war, and so on—and progress to a superintelligent stage when super-advanced simulations will become possible.
2. At least some of the advanced beings of the future will be interested in creating detailed simulations of their past, perhaps as a historical research tool to learn about the everyday lives of their ancestors, or maybe to simply entertain themselves.
In other words, if the human race survives for another thousand years and remains interested in exploring its history, then it will surely create a huge number of virtual worlds designed to simulate the societies of past eras, including the twenty-first century. Because the simulations will be perfectly realistic, how can we tell if our own world is real or virtual?
The best we can do is make a guess based on the probabilities. If the advanced beings of the future will create thousands of simulations of the twenty-first century, then it’s much more likely that we live in one of their many virtual worlds rather than in the single world of their real ancestors. Therefore, we probably live in a simulation.
I explicated this argument, step by step, at the beach bonfire in Delaware. I could tell it was making an impression on my friends, because they fell silent when I reached the conclusion. The only sounds were the crackle of the fire and the crashing waves of the Atlantic. It’s disorienting to doubt the reality of the world, especially when those doubts sound so logical.
And this disorienting idea is spreading fast. In April 2016, several prominent scientists and philosophers gathered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City to debate the simulation hypothesis. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium and host of the popular Cosmos television series, declared it “very likely” that our world is virtual.
So I chose to weave this ghost story into The Silence, the final book of the trilogy that started with The Six and The Siege. Adam Armstrong, the hero of the series, and his fellow Pioneers are nonbiological intelligences living inside advanced circuits. Because their minds are software, it’s easy to imagine that their world is a program too.
It’s harder to believe that our own world is virtual, but it’s also hard to rule out the simulation hypothesis. I believe in it enough that I had mixed feelings about describing the idea in a novel. If our world is virtual and a significant number of its simulated people start to realize the truth, they might start behaving in ways that distort the accuracy of the simulation. Then the programmers of our virtual world might choose to shut it down, which would be very bad for all of us.
But in the end I decided to write the book anyway. It’s hard to resist a good ghost story.
About the Author
Mark Alpert is a contributing editor at Scientific American and the author of several science-oriented adult thrillers: Final Theory, The Omega Theory, Extinction, The Furies, and The Orion Plan. His first young adult novels, The Six and The Siege, introduced the team of human-machine hybrids known as the Pioneers. He lives with his wife and two nonrobotic teenagers in New York. Visit Mark online at markalpert.com.
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