Instantiation

by Greg Egan

  Instantiation

  Greg Egan

  First Edition, 2020

  ISBN 978-1-922240-32-3

  Copyright © Greg Egan, 2020. All rights reserved.

  Supplementary material for this book can be found on the author’s web site, www.gregegan.net

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, November/December 2017.

  “Zero For Conduct” was first published in Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Stephen Cass. Special fiction edition of MIT Technology Review, September 2013.

  “Uncanny Valley” was first published on Tor.com, August 2017.

  “Seventh Sight” was first published in Upgraded, edited by Neil Clarke; Wyrm Publishing, 2014.

  “The Nearest” was first published on Tor.com, July 2018.

  “Shadow Flock” was first published in Coming Soon Enough, edited by Stephen Cass; IEEE Spectrum, New York, 2014.

  “Bit Players” was first published in Subterranean Online, Winter 2014 issue, guest edited by Jonathan Strahan.

  “Break My Fall” was first published in Reach For Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan; Solaris, Oxford, 2014.

  “3-adica” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2018.

  “The Slipway” was first published in Analog, July/August 2019.

  “Instantiation” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March/April 2019.

  THE DISCRETE CHARM OF THE TURING MACHINE

  1

  “What is it, exactly, that you’re threatening to do to me?” The client squinted down at his phone, looking more bemused and weary than belligerent, as if he’d been badgered and harassed by so many people that the only thing bothering him about this call was the time it was taking to reach the part where he was given an ultimatum.

  “This is absolutely not a threat, Mr Pavlos.” Dan glanced at the out-stream and saw that the software was exaggerating all the cues for openness in his demeanor – less a cheat than a workaround for the fact that his face was being rendered at about the size of a matchbox. “If you don’t take up our offer, we won’t be involved in any way with the recovery of your debt. We think it would be to your benefit if you let us step in and help, but if you don’t want us to intervene, we won’t become your creditors at all. We will only buy your debt if you ask us to.”

  The client was silent for a moment. “So … you’d pay off all the people I owe money to?”

  “Yes. If that’s what you want.”

  “And then I’ll owe it all to you, instead?”

  “You will,” Dan agreed. “But if that happens, we’ll do two things for you. The first is, we will halve the debt. We won’t ever press you for the full amount. The other thing is, we’ll work with you on financial advice and a payment plan that satisfies both of us. If we can’t find an arrangement you’re happy with, then we won’t proceed, and we’ll be out of your life.”

  The client rubbed one eye with his free thumb. “So I only pay half the money, in instalments that I get to choose for myself?” He sounded a tad skeptical.

  “Within reason,” Dan stressed. “If you hold out for a dollar a week, that’s not going to fly.”

  “So where do you make your cut?”

  “We buy the debt cheaply, in bulk,” Dan replied. “I’m not even going to tell you how cheaply, because that’s commercial-in-confidence, but I promise you we can make a profit while still getting only half.”

  “It sounds like a scam,” the client said warily.

  “Take the contract to a community legal center,” Dan suggested. “Take as long as you like checking it out. Our offer has no time limit; the only ticking clock is whether someone nastier and greedier buys the debt before we do.”

  The client shifted his hard-hat and rubbed sweat from his forehead. Someone in the distance called out to him impatiently. “I know I’ve caught you on your meal break,” Dan said. “There’s no rush to decide anything, but can I email you the documents?”

  “All right,” the client conceded.

  “Thanks for giving me your time, Mr Pavlos. Good luck with everything.”

  “OK.”

  Dan waited for the client to break the connection, even though his next call was already ringing. Give me a chance to let them believe I’ll still remember their name five seconds from now, he pleaded.

  The in-stream window went black, and for a moment Dan saw his own face reflected in the glass – complete with headset, eyes puffy from hay-fever, and the weird pink rash on his forehead that had appeared two days before. The out-stream still resembled him pretty closely – the filter was set to everyman, not movie star – but nobody should have to look at that rash.

  The new client picked up. “Good morning,” Dan began cheerfully. “Is that Ms Lombardi?”

  “Yes.” Someone had definitely opted for movie star, but Dan kept any hint of knowing amusement from his face; his own filter was as likely to exaggerate that as conceal it.

  “I’d like to talk to you about your financial situation. I think I might have some good news for you.”

  #

  When Dan came back from his break, the computer sensed his presence and woke. He’d barely put on his headset when a window opened and a woman he’d never seen before addressed him in a briskly pleasant tone.

  “Good afternoon, Dan.”

  “Good afternoon.”

  “I’m calling you on behalf of Human Resources. I need to ask you to empty your cubicle. Make sure you take everything now, because once you’ve left the floor, you won’t have an opportunity to return.”

  Dan hesitated, trying to decide if the call could be a prank. But there was a padlock icon next to the address, ruth_bayer@HR.thriftocracy.com, which implied an authenticated connection.

  “I’ve been over-target every week this quarter!” he protested.

  “And your bonuses have reflected that,” Ms Bayer replied smoothly. “We’re grateful for your service, Dan, but you’ll understand that as circumstances change, we need to fine-tune our assets to maintain an optimal fit.”

  Before he could reply, she delivered a parting smile and terminated the connection. And before he could call back, all the application windows on his screen closed, and the system logged him out.

  Dan sat motionless for ten or fifteen seconds, but then sheer habit snapped him out of it: if the screen was blank, it was time to leave. He pulled his gym bag out from under the desk, unzipped it, and slid the three framed photos in next to his towel. The company could keep his plants, or throw them out; he didn’t care. As he walked down the aisle between the cubicles, he kept his eyes fixed on the carpet; his colleagues were busy, and he didn’t want to embarrass them with the task of finding the right words to mark his departure in the twenty or thirty seconds they could spare before they’d be docked. He felt his face flushing, recalling the time a year or so ago when a man he’d barely known had left in tears. Dan had rolled his eyes and thought: What did you expect? A farewell party? An engraved fountain pen?

  As he waited for the elevator, he contemplated taking a trip to the seventh floor to demand an explanation. It made no sense to let him go when his KPIs weren’t just solid, they’d been trending upward. There must have been a mistake.

  The doors opened and he stepped into the elevator. “Seven,” he grunted.

  “Ground floor,” the elevator replied.

  “Seven,” Dan repeated emphatically.

  The doors closed, and the elevator descended.

  When it reached the lobby, he stepped out, then quickly stepped back in. “Seventh floor,” he requested breezily, hoping that a change of tone and body language might be enough to fool it.

  The doors re
mained open. He waited, as if he could wear the thing down by sheer persistence, or shame it into changing its mind, the way Janice could melt a night-club bouncer’s stony heart with one quiver of her bottom lip. But if his access was revoked, it was revoked; magical thinking wouldn’t bring it back.

  He raised his face to the button-sized security camera on the ceiling and silently mouthed a long string of expletives, making sure not to repeat himself; if it ended up in some YouTube compilation he didn’t want to look lame. Then he walked out of the elevator, across the lobby, and out of the building without looking back.

  The job hadn’t been the worst he’d done, but after four years he was due for a change. Screw Thriftocracy; he’d have something better by the end of the week.

  2

  Dan looked around at the group of parents gathered beside him at the school gate, mentally sorting them into three categories: those whose work hours happened to accommodate the pick-up, those who’d willingly chosen a life of domestic duties, and those who seemed worried that someone might ask them why they weren’t in a place of business at three o’clock on a weekday afternoon.

  “First time?” The speaker was a man with a boyish face and a fast-receding hairline. Dan had picked him for a category two, but on second glance he was less sure.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  The man smiled, a little puzzled. “I just meant I hadn’t seen you here before.” He offered his hand. “I’m Graham.”

  “Dan.”

  “Mine are in years two and five. Catherine and Elliot.”

  “Mine’s in year three,” Dan replied. “So I guess she won’t know them.” That was a relief; Graham put out a definite needy vibe, and being the parent of one of his children’s friends could well have made Dan the target for an extended conversation.

  “So you’re on holiday?”

  “Between jobs,” Dan admitted.

  “Me too,” Graham replied. “It’s been two years now.”

  Dan frowned sympathetically. “What line of work are you in?”

  “I was a forensic accountant.”

  “I’m in financial services, but more the sales end,” Dan explained. “I don’t even know why they turfed me out; I thought I was doing well.” As the words emerged, they sounded far more bitter than he’d intended.

  Graham took hold of Dan’s forearm, as if they were old friends and Dan’s mother had just died. “I know what that’s like, believe me. But the only way to survive is to stick together. You should join our group!”

  Dan hesitated, unsure what that might entail. He wasn’t so proud as to turn down the chance of car-pooling for the school pick-ups, and he’d happily weed a community garden if it put a dent in the grocery bill.

  “We meet on Wednesday afternoons,” Graham explained, “for book club, fight club, carpentry and scrapbooking, and once a month, we go out into the desert to interrogate our masculinity.”

  “Does that include water-boarding?” Dan wondered. Graham stared back at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Daddy, look at this!” Carlie shouted, running toward him so fast that Dan was afraid she was going to fall flat on her face. He broke free of Graham and held up his hands toward her like a crossing guard facing a runaway truck.

  “Slow down, gorgeous, I’m not going anywhere.”

  She ran into his arms and he lofted her up into the air. As he lowered her, she brought one hand around and showed him the sheet of paper she’d been clutching.

  “Oh, that’s beautiful!” he said, postponing more specific praise until he knew exactly who was meant to be portrayed here.

  “It’s my new teacher, Ms Snowball!”

  Dan examined the drawing more carefully as they walked toward the car. It looked like a woman with a rabbit’s head.

  “This is nice, but you shouldn’t say it’s your teacher.”

  “But it is,” Carlie replied.

  “Don’t you think Ms Jameson will be hurt if you draw her like this?”

  “Ms Jameson’s gone,” Carlie explained impatiently. “Ms Clay sits at her desk, but she’s not my teacher. Ms Snowball’s my teacher. I chose her.”

  “OK.” Dan was starting to remember a conversation he’d had with Janice, months before. There was a trial being rolled out at the school, with iPads and educational avatars. The information sheet for the parents had made it sound laudably one-to-one, tailored to each individual student’s needs, but somehow he’d never quite imagined it involving his daughter being tutored by the creature from Donnie Darko.

  “So Ms Snowball’s on your iPad?” he checked.

  “Of course.”

  “But where has Ms Jameson gone?”

  Carlie shrugged.

  “I thought you liked her.” Dan unlocked the car and opened the front passenger door.

  “I did.” Carlie seemed to suffer a twinge of divided loyalties. “But Ms Snowball’s fun, and she’s always got time to help me.”

  “All right. So what does Ms Clay do?”

  “She sits at her desk.”

  “She still teaches most of the lessons, right?”

  Carlie didn’t reply, but she frowned, as if she feared that her answer might carry the same kind of risk as confessing to a magic power to transform the carrots in her lunchbox into chocolate bars.

  “I’m just asking,” Dan said gently. “I wasn’t in the classroom, was I? So I don’t know.”

  “Ms Clay has her own iPad,” Carlie said. “She watches that. When we go to recess and lunch she stands up and smiles and talks to us, but the other times she just uses her iPad. I think she’s watching something sad.”

  #

  “It is only a trial,” Janice said, examining the document on her phone. “At the end of two terms, they’ll assess the results and notify the, er, stakeholders.”

  “Are we stakeholders?” Dan asked. “Do you think being a parent of one of their students nudges us over the line?”

  Janice put the phone down on the dining table. “What do you want to do? It’s too late to object, and we don’t want to pull her out of that school.”

  “No, of course not!” He leaned over and kissed her, hoping to smooth away her worried expression. “I wish they’d made things clearer from the start, but a few months with Mrs Flopsy’s not the end of the world.”

  Janice opened her mouth to correct him on the name, but then she realized he was being facetious. “I’d never picked you as a Beatrix Potter fan.”

  “You have no idea what my men’s group gets up to.”

  3

  Dan woke suddenly, and squinted at the bedside clock. It was just after three a.m. He kept himself still; Janice would have to get up in less than an hour, with her shift at the hospital starting at five, so if he woke her now she’d never fall back to sleep.

  She only had the extra shifts while a colleague was on maternity leave; at the end of the month she’d be back to her old hours. If he didn’t find work by then, they had enough in their savings account to pay the mortgage for at most another month. And while his old employer could work their magic on smaller sums, they weren’t going to offer his family a chance to keep this house at half price.

  Where had he gone wrong? He could never have been a doctor or an engineer, but the last plumber he’d hired had charged more for half an hour’s work than Dan had ever earned in a day. He didn’t see how he could afford any kind of retraining now, though, even if they accepted thirty-five-year-old business school graduates who’d earned a C in high school metalwork.

  When Janice rose, Dan pretended he was still asleep, and waited for her to leave the house. Then he climbed out of bed, turned on his laptop and logged in to the JobSeekers site. He would have received an email if there’d been any offers, but he read through his résumé for the hundredth time, trying to decide if there was anything he could do to embellish it that would broaden his appeal. Inserting the right management jargon into his descriptions of his duties in past positions had done wonders before, but the diale
ct of the bullshit merchants mutated so rapidly that it was hard to keep up.

  As he gazed despondently at the already ugly prose, an advertisement in the margin caught his eye. Have you been skill-cloned? it asked. Join our international class action, and you could be in line for a six-figure payout!

  His anti-virus software raised no red flags for the link, so he clicked through to a page on the site of an American law firm, Baker and Saunders. Dismissed from a job that you were doing well? he read. Your employer might have used legally dubious software to copy your skills, allowing their computers to take over and perform the same tasks without payment!

  How hard would it have been for the software that had peered over his shoulder for the last four years to capture the essence of his interactions with his clients? To learn how to gauge their mood and tailor a response that soothed their qualms? Handling those ten-minute conversations was probably far easier than keeping an eight-year-old focused on their lessons for hours at a time.

  Dan read through the full pitch, then opened another browser window and did a search to see if there were any local law firms mounting a similar case; if he did this at all, it might be better to join an action in an Australian court. But there was nothing, and the American case seemed focused as much on the skill-cloning software’s Seattle-based vendor, Deepity Systems, as the various companies around the world that had deployed it.

  He had no proof that Thriftocracy had duped him into training an unpaid successor, but the lawyers had set up a comprehensive online questionnaire, the answers to which would allow them, eventually, to determine if he was eligible to be included in the class action. Dan wasn’t sure if they were hoping to get a court order forcing Deepity to disclose its list of clients, but their pitch made it sound as if the greater the enrollment of potential litigants at this early stage, the stronger their position would be as they sought information to advance the case. And it would cost him nothing to join; it was all being done on a no win, no fee basis.