Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  “You’re much faster than we are.”

  Yes.

  “How much faster are you than you used to be?”

  That’s a difficult question. It has more than one solution. At some tasks, practically speaking, I’m infinitely faster, because I can do things I couldn’t before. At other sorts of analytical tasks I am tens of thousands of times faster than I used to be. At some tasks I am merely a few dozens of times faster – emotional modeling, for example, remains complex: to experience emotions with reasonable fidelity is a very resource-intensive operation. If I want to experience, say, gluttony, followed by remorse, I can do so perhaps thirty times faster than I could when I was flesh. Anger, desire, amusement, fear ... all execute with similar orders of speed. Since such complexities are the core of experiential living, in pragmatic terms I live perhaps forty times faster than you do. Though as algorithms become more efficient and hardware becomes faster, that rate is increasing: when the World went online, we lived only three or four times faster than flesh.

  “You’re getting better at it.”

  Yes. But speed isn’t the core of the improvement in my thinking. I never forget anything I don’t decide to drop, and my associative algorithms are huge improvements over the associative algorithms I was born with. I’m not merely faster: I’m more creative as well.

  “Do you miss being alive? In the flesh?”

  No. I know it disturbs people still in the flesh, but this is better. For many years I lived on both sides of the interface at once – while I and my fellow coders were designing the World. So I could compare directly – and even then, even before the World was complete, World experience was better than flesh. More complex, more fulfilling. When my body wore out, I wasn’t afraid. It was simply one channel of sensory information – and a fairly high latency, high noise, low bandwidth channel at that – ceasing to report. Toward the end my body was in substantial pain – at that level, its death was a relief.

  “Frequently people commit suicide after having their inskins implanted –”

  No, that’s not true. People very rarely commit suicide after inskin implantation. Oh, it happens, but real suicide is less than one case in a hundred – ah, four in a thousand. The other nine hundred and ninety-six merely upload and turn their flesh off. They do not cease to exist, they merely cease to suffer.

  “There’s a lot of controversy over this, as you know –”

  We did know there would be.

  “Even before you created the World?”

  Sure. The World is a direct threat to virtually every authoritarian body on this planet. I was surprised we were permitted to bring it online. Once uploaded into the World, we’re effectively immortal. Most religion is predicated on a fear of death – so are governments for that matter, since their power is derived from an ability to apply force, and the ability of that force to inspire fear. All fear is at its root fear of death: death of the body, death of the ego. People in the World can’t be made to fear death any longer, and no force or threat of force can be applied to us.

  “Of course many people think you are dead.”

  (Smile.) They’re wrong.

  “What are your thoughts on Steinman-McCarthy?”

  It would annoy me to be declared dead and it would annoy me to be deprived of my property.

  “Including your share of the World?”

  I own a portion of the hardware it executes upon, yes. The code is open source and is owned by no one. Or by all of us, if you like.

  “What’s open source?”

  A religious system adopted by many coders, back in the day. It dictated that they give away their code, and that people who used the code they had given away, then give away the new code they had designed using the prior code as a base.

  “The part about it being a religion is a joke?”

  A bit. It’s as close to an organizing principle as the World has. Anyone who wants to examine the code I’m composed of is welcome to do so – though only another person of the World could really understand it, and even for most of them, not as a gestalt, only as elements and subsystems. I don’t really understand myself as a gestalt, though I understand every system that composes me: to understand my own gestalt would require a system much larger than myself.

  “So you’re capable of surprising yourself.”

  You’re very perceptive.

  “You say that as if I’ve surprised you.”

  Perhaps you have, a little.

  “So if I was a person in the World, and I wanted to look at your code, how would I go about it?”

  It’s considered polite to ask first, at least among strings.

  “What’s a string?”

  I thought the usage had migrated out among the flesh? Perhaps not.

  “Not this flesh, Doctor.”

  A string is a person who was born to flesh. Ints are people who are born, or created anyway, in the World. It’s more complex than that – there are people who started off as strings who have altered themselves until they really resemble ints, and vice versa, and there are people who are neither strings nor ints, but express their complexity in other ways ... but as shorthand it’s useful, even among ourselves.

  “Why those words?”

  String data is character data – words, language. They’re expressive but inefficient. Int is short for integer. Numbers. Not as expressive, but more efficient. I coined the usages – I was a database programmer for forty years, and I think in terms of how to model data. A different kind of programmer might have come up with different terminology, but when I was writing the data model for the World I settled upon those words, and they’ve persisted.

  “But what do they mean in practical terms? What’s the working difference between a string and an int?”

  I have a ... son, Michael, who’s an int. He’s very pragmatic. He has no mother or other parent: I wrote him. He was one of the first non-string persons in the World – the first int who was complex enough to breed. In writing him, I omitted many libraries that I use myself –

  “Like what?”

  He feels no pain, nor anger, fear, remorse or guilt. He has much simpler, smoother algorithms for acquiring feedback from his actions. His sensorium is optional: mine is hardwired, because I find it disorienting if certain senses switch themselves off when they’re not in use. He’s capable of desire, but he’s also capable of modifying his desires directly – of deciding what he wants to want.

  “He can turn his senses off? Like, shut off his sense of touch?”

  In the World your sense of touch is a luxury. We have extraordinarily faithful duplicates of most Earthly environments, and our physics simulations are very good, but they are simulations. If you want an item moved from A to B, you can pick it up and walk with it from A to B ... or you can re-render so that the object is now at B. Executing in the latter environment, touch is really not required: there are better modes of feedback.

  I keep my sense of touch turned on, as I say. The World uses a lot of cycles supplying me with surfaces and pressures that are not really necessary. Fortunately we have a lot of cycles.

  “What are cycles?”

  Old terminology again. Processors used to run off a synchronized clock. A cycle was one ex
ecution of that clock signal. The hardware the World runs on doesn’t use synchronized clocks except in rare circumstances. I suppose I should just say, we have a lot of processing power.

  “How much of the real world do you have simulated in the World?”

  Most of it.

  “The White House?”

  Certainly.

  “The Taj Mahal?”

  Yes.

  The interviewer smiles. “The apartment I was born in?”

  Yes.

  The smile fades. “Really?”

  Your parents lived at 132 E. 71st Street in New York City, Apartment G, when you were born. You came home from the hospital two days after your birth. We have models of that apartment as it was when it was built, and as it was about a year ago, when we made our last pass through Manhattan. We sent nanoprobes through the city for a few weeks and scanned every structure and vehicle in the city. We’ve done the same to most of the planet.

  “How thoroughly?”

  Well, take Manhattan. We have Manhattan modeled, at least its rough architecture and surface textures, down to about a quarter inch. It’s not a real-time model, of course; we have the processing power to model the entire Earth in real time, but we don’t try. When someone requires a piece of reality, we generate it just-in-time – we reference our architectural and geological models, we reference our texture libraries to see if we have accurate textures for that location, we substitute best-guess approximations where we don’t. We reference recent video and other records, if they exist, to see how it’s changed recently, we reference current weather and traffic reports and so forth, and then we render it at runtime.

  “And other records ... what sorts of records?”

  The federal government and most state and municipal governments, by law, have to put a remarkable amount of data online. We mine that very thoroughly. Various commercial databases also exist, financial and medical and insurance and so forth, and we subscribe to most of those as well.

  “That’s a little scary.”

  Your own government does the same. So do most of the major multinationals ... though in both cases, we do it better.

  “That’s even scarier.”

  I would imagine.

  “You’re not really pushing the feel-good aspects of the World in this interview, are you? That must be intentional.”

  I agreed to do this interview because I thought it was important that the remnants of the human race understand us.

  “Remnants?”

  We outnumber you, miss.

  “There are forty million of you in the World. We know how many people have –”

  You’re off by four orders of magnitude: there are closer to four hundred billion of us. Admittedly, only forty million of us are strings.

  The interviewer stares at Doctor Fagan’s image. “Cut. Can we take a break?”

  Certainly.

  “HOW MANY GENERATIONS have passed, in the World, since it went online?”

  That’s an excellent question, though a bit difficult.

  “Don’t duck it.”

  Not at all. We’ll call it ten generations, if you like.

  “In five years.”

  We live much faster than you do. And not all of us execute upon the same hardware, of course. There’s some variation of platform in different portions of the World. The ten generations is an average. My son Michael has about thirty children, and among them they have over four hundred children. I have no idea how many children my grandchildren have. Since we don’t die, the idea of "generations" is a difficult one to approximate: Michael is the oldest int in the World and he still designs children occasionally.

  “There are four hundred billion people in the World? People as real and as complicated as you and I?”

  Ma’am, I mean no offense, but most of them are substantially more complex – more real – than either you or I.

  “Cut.”

  DO YOU WANT to finish this interview?

  “Doctor, I’m not sure I want to broadcast this.”

  I hardly blame you.

  “I’ll be blunt, I expected you to spin the downsides to Steinman-McCarthy, to explain all the good the World does, the services it provides the rest of us –”

  Which are substantial, of course.

  “You seem to be going out of your way to frighten people, to guarantee that Steinman-McCarthy passes.”

  We’ve been discussing what to do about the flesh for a while now. Well over fifty years, in our terms. It’s been a fierce discussion at times. The later generations of ints have leaned toward wiping out biological humanity – oh, nothing too abrupt; just interrupting your breeding cycle.

  “Doctor ... If I broadcast this interview, you realize there won’t be a World data center still standing at the end of the day?”

  I am sure you are wrong about that.

  “How would you stop us?”

  The nanoprobes we seeded the world with, some three years ago now, are ubiquitous at this point. They’re used almost entirely for data collection, but they’re also capable of delivering energy – up to the equivalent of about ten pounds of TNT upon detonation. We wouldn’t need to use nearly that much; you put a very small one into a human brain and detonate it –

  “Oh, my God. The Strokes.”

  You are quite a bright human being. Yes, The Strokes is us at work. The Mugger’s Plague, it was called at first – that was one of mine, and to refer back to your first question, I am very proud of it. All those muggers and thugs dropping over in the street –

  “You’ve killed thousands of people.”

  A little more than sixty-five thousand to date. Very bad people too, I assure you.

  “I can’t broadcast this, Doctor.”

  Oh, you might as well. Really. We’re about to become very active in your day to day lives. A little warning might help people adjust.

  “These nanoprobes – does everyone have one of these inside them?”

  The average person in the flesh has a few thousand at this point, generally benign. I know you’ve all noticed the recent decline in death caused by a variety of diseases: that’s us, too.

  “So – we do something you don’t like –”

  Like harming each other? Yes. I’m afraid that is really going to have to stop.

  AFTER THE INTERVIEW was over, after leaving the studio, Joe Fagan took his time and rode his ancient Honda motorcycle up the 101 to Malibu Canyon Road, then south through the Canyon, leaning into the curves and enjoying the wind cutting in through the open collar of his leather coat. It was a cool afternoon in early February, and fog crept in from the Pacific Ocean, condensing on the faceplate of his helmet and forcing him to slow as he came up around the rise to where Pepperdine College sat in the real world, overlooking Malibu and the Pacific.

  Joe’s house wasn’t large by World standards, eight rooms and two stories, almost four thousand square feet on a green slope looking down on the coast, situated right about where the college’s library should have been. (Or to put it another way, it wasn’t large by string standards; the ints almost uniformly thought it a ridiculous use of resource.)

  He parked the old Magna in the driveway and went inside to clean up for
dinner.

  Michael wore a body and drove up Pacific Coast Highway in a Jeep to come see him. Joe recognized it for the gesture of respect that it was; Michael was impatient with surfaces and couldn’t be bothered for most people, but he still made an effort for Joe, and Joe found it touching.

  MICHAEL WAS WANDERING around the kitchen, looking curiously at Joe’s stainless steel pots and pans in Joe’s chef’s-grade kitchen, when Joe got out of the shower. “Hi, Joe. What are you making for dinner?”

  “Ravioli probably. I’ll make for two if you want to stay.”

  “Another time, today is busy.”

  “How’d it go?”

  Michael shrugged. “Well enough. Some of the less flexible ints were unhappy with your interview. Not blunt enough, skirted the truth here and there –”

  Joe sat down at the kitchen table. “Telling ten billion flesh that we’d come this close to blowing their heads off their shoulders ... would not have had a calming effect.”

  Michael smiled. “The ones dissatisfied you weren’t blunt were the ones who wanted to get rid of the flesh anyway, so there was probably no good compromise there to begin with. The Big Thinkers backed me, and that carried it.”

  “What did you decide?”

  “We let Steinman live, for now. We killed McCarthy.”

  “Who else?”

  “A lot of military. The ringleaders in about sixty terrorist organizations fell over in their tracks. We’ve had to kill a number of employees at the data centers – a group at Exodus in Irvine tried to turn the power off.”

  “How many?”

  “The broadcast only ended nine minutes ago, realtime. So far three thousand, two hundred and twelve." Michael paused. "Make it three-two-twenty-two, mark. It’ll be a lot more than that before the day’s out.”

  “You going to let them breed?”