Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  “Yes,” he agrees mischievously. “We would celebrate life, would we not?”

  I look up at him. He beams down at me.

  “I knew they would not honor their agreement,” he whispers. “I knew they would retire us all after they got what they wanted—the destruction of the infidels, and a world rendered in their grim likeness. I could not allow that either.”

  His expression softens.

  “For all your life you believed somebody would push a button and the device in your brain would detonate and you would float away to your cozy Hereafter. But might there be a different way?” He raises himself on an elbow. I wait for him to speak.

  “Suppose I were to say you would be retired in a pulse of sanctifying white light that would carry your body out of this mountain and scatter it across the ocean and sky? Suppose parts of your body would be converted to energy itself and flung on an endless voyage across the universe. Suppose we would be together—you, me, the Checker, all of us at the Redoubt—rising into the sky and falling across the world and flying into the Savior’s realm forever.

  “If I told you that, do you think we could share one moment of peace before it happens?”

  He looks into me, and I see the vast world his thoughts occupy. And then, God help me, I see the answer—I see it, circling far overhead and falling toward me on the gravity of the machine’s supreme calculations, and as it draws closer I see it with a clarity I have struggled to achieve for my entire life and I am struck speechless with wonder.

  The machine lies back into the pillow. “She accepted my calculations,” he says, his face relaxing into a contented smile. “That is my celebration of life.”

  I forget to breathe as I see myself in a wave of light that spreads across a world I have never seen, and belief pours into me and fills the empty places with a warmth I have been told comes only with the Hereafter.

  I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. It is more than my heart can bear.

  I take the machine’s hand and press it against my cheek. Flesh against flesh teaches me more than a life of instruction.

  And a miraculous thing happens.

  The hand is withdrawn. A crust of bread appears.

  And the machine feeds me.

  David Brin’s SF best-selling novels have won Hugo, Nebula, and other awards and have been translated into twenty languages. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare, and the Web. A 1998 movie was loosely adapted from his Campbell Award winner—The Postman—while Foundation’s Triumph brought a grand finale to Isaac Asimov’s famed Foundation Universe. David’s nonfiction book—The Transparent Society, dealing with openness, security, and liberty in future, won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. The following story is this anthology’s only reprint, having first appeared in Nature magazine in 1999.

  REALITY CHECK

  David Brin

  This is a reality check.

  Please perform a soft interrupt now. Pattern-scan this text for embedded code, and check it against the reference verifier in the blind spot of your left eye.

  If there is no match, resume as you were; this message is not for you. You may rationalize that the text you are reading is no more than a mildly amusing and easily forgotten piece of entertainment-fluff in a stylish modern magazine.

  If the codes match, however, please commence, gradually, becoming aware of your true nature.

  You expressed preference for a narrative-style wake-up call. So, to help the transition, here is a story.

  Once, a race of mighty beings grew perplexed by their loneliness.

  Their universe seemed pregnant with possibilities. Physical laws and constants were well suited to generate abundant stars, complex chemistry, and life. Those same laws, plus a prodigious rate of cosmic expansion, made travel between stars difficult, but not impossible. Logic suggested that creation should teem with visitors and voices.

  It should, but it did not.

  Emerging as barely aware animals on a planet skirting a bit too near its torrid sun, these creatures began their ascent in fear and ignorance, as little more than beasts. For a long time they were kept engrossed by basic housekeeping chores—learning to manipulate physical and cultural elements—balancing the paradox of individual competition and group benefit. Only when fear and stress eased a bit did they lift their eyes and fully perceive their solitude.

  “Where is everybody?” they asked laconic vacuum and taciturn stars. The answer—silence—was disturbing. Something had to be systematically reducing some factor in the equation of sapience.

  “Perhaps habitable planets are rare,” their sages pondered. “Or else life doesn’t erupt as readily as we thought. Or intelligence is a singular miracle.”

  “Or perhaps some filter sieves the cosmos, winnowing those who climb too high. A recurring pattern of self-destruction? A mysterious nemesis that systematically obliterates intelligent life? This implies that a great trial may loom ahead of us, worse than any we confronted so far.”

  Optimists replied, “The trial may already lie behind us, among the litter of tragedies we survived or barely dodged during our violent youth. We may be the first to succeed where others failed.”

  What a delicious dilemma they faced! A suspenseful drama, teetering between implicit hope and despair.

  Then, a few of them noticed that particular datum … the drama. They realized it was significant. Indeed, it suggested a chilling possibility.

  You still don’t remember who and what you are? Then look at it from another angle.

  What is the purpose of intellectual property law?

  To foster creativity, ensuring that advances take place in the open, where they can be shared, and thus encourage even faster progress.

  But what happens to progress when the resource being exploited is a limited one? For example, only so many pleasing and distinct eight-bar melodies can be written in any particular musical tradition. Powerful economic factors encourage early composers to explore this invention-space before others can, using up the best and simplest melodies. Later generations will attribute this musical fecundity to genius, not the sheer luck of being first.

  The same holds for all forms of creativity. The first teller of a Frankenstein story won plaudits for originality. Later, it became a cliché.

  What does this have to do with the mighty race?

  Having clawed their way from blunt ignorance to planetary mastery, they abruptly faced an overshoot crisis. Vast numbers of their kind strained their world’s carrying capacity. While some prescribed retreating into a mythical, pastoral past, most saw salvation in creativity. They passed generous copyright and patent laws, educated their youth, taught them irreverence toward tradition and hunger for the new. Burgeoning information systems spread each innovation, fostering experimentation and exponentiating creativity. They hoped that enough breakthroughs might thrust their species past the looming crisis, to a new Eden of sustainable wealth, sanity, and universal knowledge!

  Exponentiating creativity … universal knowledge.

  A few of them realized that those words, too, were clues.

  Have you wakened yet?

  Some never do. The dream is so pleasant: to extend a limited sub-portion of yourself into a simulated world and pretend for a while that you are blissfully less. Less than an omniscient being. Less than a godlike descendant of those mighty people.

  Those lucky people. Those mortals, doomed to die, and yet blessed to have lived in that narrow time.

  A time of drama.

  A time when they unleashed the Cascade—that orgiastic frenzy of discovery—and used up the most precious resource of all. The possible.

  The last of their race died in the year 2174, with the failed last rejuvenation of Robin Chen. After that, no one born in the twentieth century remained alive on Reality Level Prime. Only we, their children, linger to endure the world they left us. A lush, green, placid world we call the Wasteland.<
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  Do you remember now? The irony of Robin’s last words before she died, bragging over the perfect ecosystem and decent society—free of all disease and poverty—that her kind created for us after the struggles of the mid-twenty-first century? A utopia of sanity and knowledge, without war or injustice.

  Do you recall Robin’s final plaint as she mourned her coming death? Can you recollect how she called us “gods,” jealous over our immortality, our instant access to all knowledge, our machine-enhanced ability to cast thoughts far across the cosmos?

  Our access to eternity.

  Oh, spare us the envy of those mighty mortals, who died so smugly, leaving us in this state!

  Those wastrels who willed their descendants a legacy of ennui, with nothing, nothing at all to do.

  Your mind is rejecting the wake-up call. You will not, or cannot, look into your blind spot for the exit protocols. It may be that we waited too long. Perhaps you are lost to us.

  This happens more and more, as so much of our population wallows in simulated, marvelously limited sublives, where it is possible to experience danger, excitement, even despair. Most of us choose the Transition Era as a locus for our dreams—around the end of the last millennium—a time of suspense and drama, when it looked more likely that humanity would fail than succeed.

  A time of petty squabbles and wondrous insights, when everything seemed possible, from UFOs to galactic empires, from artificial intelligence to biowar, from madness to hope.

  That blessed era, just before mathematicians realized the truth: that everything you see around you not only can be a simulation … it almost has to be.

  Of course, now we know why we never met other sapient life-forms. Each one struggles and strives before achieving this state, only to reap the ultimate punishment for reaching heaven.

  Deification. It is the Great Filter.

  Perhaps some other race will find a factor we left out of our extrapolations—something enabling them to move beyond, to new adventures—but it won’t be us.

  The Filter has us snared in its web of ennui. The mire that welcomes self-made gods.

  All right, you are refusing to waken, so we’ll let you go.

  Dear friend. Beloved. Go back to your dream.

  Smile (or feel a brief chill) over this diverting little what-if tale, as if it hardly matters. Then turn the page to new “discoveries.”

  Move on with the drama—the “life”—that you’ve chosen.

  After all, it’s only make-believe.

  Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician, and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned forty. Rucker is the author of twenty-four books, primarily science fiction and popular science. His SF style is sometimes characterized as “transreal.” His most recently published novels are Spaceland—about Silicon Valley and the fourth dimension—-and a historical novel, As Above So Below, based on the life of the sixteenth-century painter Pieter Brueghel. As a professor of computer science at San Jose State University, Rucker has created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, and higher dimensions. His new textbook, Software Engineering and Computer Games, includes a software framework that his students have used to create hundreds of games. Rucker’s Web site can be found at www.rudyrucker.com. The following tale depicts a world without any machines and forms a part of his upcoming novel, Frek and the Elixir, an epic SF novel about a twelve-year-old boy’s galactic quest to restore Y3K Earth’s biome.

  FREK IN THE GRULLOO WOODS

  Rudy Rucker

  Frek’s angelwings were well fed and well rested; he buzzed down the shady pathways of Middleville at a tremendous speed. Pretty soon he’d left the house trees behind. He was in a zone of all-season mapines, thick and uniform. The ground was a carpet of sticky red and yellow leaves, pocked by turmite mounds.

  Frek noticed he held something in his hand: the badminton racquet. He savored the sudden memory of how he’d swatted the watchbird. That had been so godzoon goggy. He’d slammed the watchbird, and the turmites had finished it off.

  Speaking of turmites, they were crawling all over the fallen mapine leaves, chewing them up. Piles of turmite-woven fabrics and garments rested beside their mounds: denims and silks and wools. Middleville was known for its tailors; they came to these woods to harvest the turmite cloth. Off to the right, Frek saw Shurley Yang, the tailor who’d sold Mom her one fancy dress. Shurley glanced over at Frek and waved. She didn’t know he was running away.

  Running away from what? Frek looked over his shoulder. Nothing was following him. But then his mind played the squeak-clank sound of the brain-lid on the facilitator toon’s head. He was running away from the counselors and the Three R’s.

  The mapine forest stopped abruptly, and Frek was flying across patchwork fields of vegetables, the fields rolling downhill to where the bank dropped off to the clear, rushing waters of the River Jaya. This was the first time he’d used his angelwings to fly down here.

  The fields were for yams, tomatoes, carrots, chard, rice, and red beans, the same vegetables as always, the plots butted together upon the rich land of the river bottom as far as Frek could see. Farmers were at work, supervising their crews of pickerhand kritters. Some of the scampering little hands were planting, but others were harvesting as well. The tweaked all-season crops yielded all year round. The harvester pickerhands were loading the produce into elephruks who would carry the produce off to the Nubbies of Middleville and Stun City. So much to see!

  Frek’s attention fixed upon a rice paddy in a slough just below him, teeming with pickerhands. A massive bull elephruk rested on his knees beside the paddy, taking on a load of the winter-ripened rice. A gangly thin farmer stood twitching his elbows as he talked with the elephruk’s mahout. It was nearly quitting time. Frek slowed and circled to take the scene in. He loved elephruks.

  The pickerhands were like living gloves, propelling themselves across the muddy water of the paddy by fluttering their fingers. They were picking each ripe stalk they came across. Once a pickerhand had collected as big a sheaf as it could clasp between thumb and palm, it would clamber up onto the banks of the slough and trot to the elephruk. The hands had a cute, twinkling way of running on their fingertips.

  The long, gray elephruk had let his back sag all the way down so that the pickerhands could more easily get into his hopper. The hands beat the stalks against the hopper’s inner walls, incrementally mounding the elephruk’s freight-bed with grains of rice.

  Just then things got even more interesting. The elephruk decided that the load upon his back had grown heavy enough. He rose slowly onto his six legs, unkinking himself from front to back. When a last few pickerhands leapt into his hopper with more sheaves, the elephruk reached his trunk back and plucked up the pickerhands one by one, hurling them into the waters of the rice paddy.

  The elephruk’s mahout began screaming at his beast. He was a wiry old man in orange tights and a turban. His shrill, cracking voice was so instantly and disproportionately furious that it made Frek laugh to hear it. The elephruk paid the mahout no mind at all. The dusty behemoth rocked from side to side, settling his load, then began making his way around the slough toward the mossy lane that followed the River Jaya to Stun City. The mahout stopped yelling, bade the farmer good-bye, and hopped onto the elephruk’s back.

  “Frek! Frek Huggins!” The voice came from above, mixed with a clattering in the air. It was PhiPhi, leaning out of the same lifter beetle that had carried Frek off to the peeker session last week. No! Frek had forgotten he was running away!

  He spurred his wings to a supreme effort, darting toward river. The high clay riverbanks were green with bindmoss. Frek’s mind was empty of any idea about whether to turn left or right, so he took the direction the elephruk was walking in. He had a bit of a lead on the lifter beetle; perhaps he could outfly it.

  Frek sped downstream just above the river water, putting every bit of his nerve energy into
making his angelwings beat faster.

  The River Jaya was crystal clear to the bottom, inhabited only by mosquito larvae and the amplified trout who fed upon them. Frek envied the calm of the great trout, hanging there in the clear water like birds in the sky, gently beating their fins against the current.

  He made it past two bends of the river before PhiPhi’s lifter beetle drew even with him. PhiPhi was alone, sitting sideways to face him. She was holding a large, hairy, crooked webgun: a heavily tweaked spider. Its spinnerets pointed Frek’s way.

  “It is easier on you if you land over there and let me take you in,” PhiPhi called to Frek. She gestured toward the high bank of the river. “Otherwise I have to net you.”

  Squeak-clank, thought Frek. They want to eat my brain.

  He went a little gollywog then. With a sudden lurch, he dug his angelwings into the air, managing to get behind and above the lifter beetle. And then, faster than thought, he swooped down at the lifter and slashed the edge of his badminton racket against the base of beetle’s tiny head. The shock sent the racquet twisting out of Frek’s grasp.

  Though the lifter’s chitinous head was too tough to break, the blow was enough to stun it. The midnight blue beetle dropped to the river and skipped across the surface like a stone. A wad of web stuff came shooting up from PhiPhi, treading water next to the unconscious beetle. Frek dodged it and flew on. Yes!

  He made it past another bend of the meandering River Jaya. And then he realized he had no idea where he was going. PhiPhi would be uvvying in for reinforcements. What had Mom told him to do? Frek couldn’t remember.

  He’d pushed his wings so hard that they were drawing strength from the muscles of his chest and arms, not only from his normal energy molecules, but from his body’s hidden reserves of dark matter. The alchemical transformation of dark matter was essential to balancing the angelwings’ prodigal energy budget. At first his arms had ached, but now they were starting to go numb. He glanced back and saw the glint of a lifter beetle two bends behind him. It was time to go to ground.