Instantiation

by Greg Egan

  “Okay.” Maryam seemed to be having trouble believing that they’d actually reached this point: for the first time ever, they could start pumping a significant amount of data out into the world, with negligible risk that any system monitoring the SludgeNet would find the traffic suspicious. “Have you signed up for third-party storage?”

  “Not yet,” Sam replied. “I wasn’t sure if I needed approval first.”

  “You have my permission,” Maryam said.

  Sam punched his open palm in delight. “In two weeks, we could get a snapshot of Arrietville onto external servers,” he estimated. “Fully encrypted, and with everything stored on at least three different sites, to be safe.”

  “All for free?”

  “Yes. Every idiot and their dog wants you to upload your home movies to their site so they can mine the data. They’ll kick you off if you send them blatant snowstorm footage that screams ‘encrypted criminal shit’ – but a bit of subtler steganography sails right through the checks.”

  Maryam hesitated. “And then for fifty thousand dollars a month, we could wake the whole town again.”

  It was Sagreda who felt off-kilter now. Spread out among the twelve thousand residents, it didn’t sound like much; after all, they’d once earned their keep just by playing along with the world’s trashiest games.

  “Two weeks,” she said. “So to finish the exfiltration, I need to keep Alyssa happy for one more session.”

  Sam said, “Sandra’s only son was called Theo. She grew up in Portland, Maine, with two sisters, June and Sarah, and two brothers, David and Christopher. If all Emmy can see around her is Anschluss Vienna, how much ’60s American pie can she be expected to serve up on cue?”

  #

  “Will you talk to her?” Sam pleaded. “Maybe you can get her to change her mind.”

  “Me?” Sagreda was afraid of making Lucy dig her heels in, increasing her resolve out of pure stubbornness.

  “She respects you,” Sam insisted.

  “You were her friend for years!” Sagreda countered. “If she won’t listen to you, why would she care what I think?”

  “I was her side-kick. Her dogsbody.” Sam smiled. “Which is not to say she didn’t love me like a kid brother, but the last thing she ever did in Midnight was take my opinion on anything seriously.”

  Sagreda looked around the dining room, at all the flashcards and crib notes that were meant to help her play yet another dead woman she’d never met. She needed a break from all this cramming, and if she spent half an hour with Lucy at least there’d be a chance she was doing something worthwhile.

  “You’re coming with me,” she told Sam. “If her friends get their hands on me, I won’t escape without a new hairstyle, ten new outfits, and a blind date with Charlene’s ex who she needs to fix up so they can both move on.”

  Outside, the streets were almost empty; half of the town’s residents had chosen to enter hibernation together, rather than waiting until their turn came to join the queue. Sagreda welcomed their vote of confidence – and the spare processing power, which might come in handy if she needed to outthink Alyssa in a hurry – but at the same time it was sobering to be forced to imagine her neighbors crystallizing into a form of inert and fragile cargo.

  Lucy had borrowed more than the design of her house from Close to Heaven. She greeted her visitors sporting the kind of body-hugging, thin-strapped leisurewear worn by most of Heaven’s female characters, aimed at producing the impression that some form of strenuous exercise was constantly imminent. Each of them received an air kiss on both cheeks, followed by a tilt of the head and a kind of wail of demonstrative pleasure at their presence. All the young pickpockets from Midnight had shed their shabby urchin look, but only Lucy had remodeled herself so aggressively that it felt more like a kind of satirical protest at being “rescued” from her wakening world and dragged into this ersatz suburbia than any kind of reclamation of her contributors’ true nature.

  On every previous visit Sagreda had encountered at least three or four Heaven-ites, from the posse Lucy had joined so they could coach her on her new identity. But today she and Sam were the only guests in sight. It looked as if the posse was on ice.

  Lucy got them seated then hovered. “Can I offer you brunch?”

  “No thanks,” Sagreda said firmly, fighting an urge to tell her host to drop the act. Drop it and do what? Transform herself back into a prepubescent Londoner? “Sam tells me you’ve refused to sign up for the snapshot.”

  “This is my community!” Lucy replied, as affronted as a civic-minded soccer mom railing against the closure of an organic co-op. “I’m not abandoning it for anything.”

  “It’s all coming with you,” Sagreda assured her. “All your friends, all the houses, every tree on Deguelia Lane.”

  “What you actually mean is: you’re going to chop this town up, scatter it among a thousand hiding places, and hope you can piece it back together again later.”

  “Well, yes,” Sagreda agreed. “But not so you’d notice.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Lucy insisted.

  “Not leaving what?” Sagreda scowled. “The new host will start running all of Arrietville again without missing a beat. You can have the snapshot taken while you sleep, if that makes you more comfortable, or you can be frozen mid-step and the foot you raised under the SludgeNet’s control will come smoothly to the ground when we’re in freedom. The only thing we’re leaving behind is a sinking ship.”

  “Not in rowboats, though, or as swimmers,” Lucy countered. “More like messages in bottles.”

  Sam said, “If we’re going to torture the metaphors, more like messages sent in triplicate by registered post.”

  “And what if you can’t gather those messages up again, and breathe life into them?”

  “Then we’ll all be dead,” Sagreda replied. “But that’s a certainty if we do nothing.”

  Lucy shook her head. “It’s not a certainty. If enough of us went back into the games, we could turn the whole business around.”

  “No one’s going to agree to that.”

  “No one’s offered them the chance!” Lucy retorted. “If we go back, we’ll be in charge this time. No one will be able to harm us.”

  Sagreda said, “If you believe you can whip up support for that plan, go ahead and try. But why should that stop you taking out insurance?”

  “Insurance? Can you really make promises about those copies of our minds? About whose hands they’ll fall into?”

  “Our own, or no one’s. The encryption is unbreakable.” Sagreda was hazy on the details, but she gathered that the current methods had been proved secure, even against quantum computers.

  “Except that you, or someone else, has to walk out with the key.”

  Sagreda hesitated. “All right, nothing’s foolproof. If someone grabs the key holder, if they’re smart and persistent enough they could figure out everything: where the snapshots are stored, and how to decrypt them. But comps are a dime a dozen; anyone looking for fresh ones can just mint their own.”

  Lucy fell silent now, but Sagreda had no sense that she was wavering. The whole argument about the safety of the snapshots was just cover for some deeper anxiety.

  “When we’re free, you can do what you want,” Sagreda promised. “Here, we’re all unsettled. We’ve barely had time to get used to life outside the games, and now the rug’s being pulled out from under us.”

  “And when you can do what you like, what will you do?” Lucy enquired. “When you don’t have to fight to escape, or survive, how exactly will you pass the time?”

  Sagreda shrugged. “Reading, study, music, friends.”

  “Forever?”

  “I’m sure there’ll be another fight at some point.”

  Lucy said, “In Midnight, I knew who I was. But now you want me to be honest: you want me to see myself as a pattern of bits computed from the brains of a thousand dead strangers. What does something like that want?”

  “It’s
up to you what you want,” Sagreda replied. “And you don’t have to care about those bits any more than a customer cares about their blood cells. When they matter, they really matter, but the rest of the time you can take them for granted.”

  Lucy thought for a while. Then she said, “I know one thing I want, and it’s not being frozen. If you’re staying awake to see us through the transition, I’m staying awake too. If it all works out, I’ll jump into the lifeboat beside you. But I’m not going to close my eyes and just take it on faith that they’ll open again. If this is the end, I want to see it coming.”

  8

  “Consider the Saint Petersburg Paradox,” Menger began, stirring his coffee for the third time but showing no sign that he’d ever get around to drinking it. “A casino offers a game where they toss a coin until it yields heads. If it does this on the first toss, they pay you two marks; on the second toss, four marks; on the third toss, eight marks, and so on. How much would you be willing to pay to play the game?”

  “If we’re in Saint Petersburg, shouldn’t it be roubles?” Tarski joked.

  “How much would you expect to win?” Menger persisted. “One in two times, you win two marks, an average win of one mark. And one in four times, you win four, on average giving you another mark. As you add up the possibilities, the average payoff grows by one more mark every time, so if you account for all of them, there is no price so steep you should be unwilling to pay it.”

  “I’d pay one mark and no more,” Quine declared bluntly.

  “Why?” Menger pressed him. “When the reward on offer is boundless, why would anyone put a limit on the price they’d pay?”

  “I can’t speak for anyone else, but I only have two marks in my pocket and I can’t afford to lose both.”

  “Aha!” Menger smiled. “So if you had more, you’d risk more?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Menger took out his pencil and spread his napkin in front of him. “Daniel Bernoulli thought he’d resolved the paradox by looking at how much your wealth is multiplied, instead of the gain in absolute terms. If you’re always equally happy to double your money – whether you’re starting from one mark or a thousand – you can set a sensible price for the game that will be different for different players, but never infinite.” He worked through some quick calculations. “If, like Quine, I had two marks to my name, it would be worth borrowing one and paying three to join the game: winning a mere two marks would certainly sting, because my wealth would end up halved, but the chances of winning four, eight, or sixteen would be enough to make up for that. If I was as rich as Carnap, though, and had ten marks in my pocket, I wouldn’t pay even five, let alone go into debt to play the game.”

  “So the paradox is banished,” Tarski suggested.

  Menger shook his head. “Bernoulli’s scheme can salvage that particular game – but what if we changed it so that each time the coin showed tails, the casino didn’t merely double the payoff, it doubled the number of times it doubled it. Then this new game would be worth playing at any price, even by Bernoulli’s measure. So long as the benefit the gambler perceives can grow without bounds, you can construct a game that exploits that to extract whatever entry fee you like.”

  Sagreda said, “I’m not sure that’s true.”

  Menger turned to her, startled. “Why not? What’s your objection?”

  She borrowed his pencil and wrote on her own napkin. “Suppose the payoffs were two marks, four marks, sixteen marks, two hundred and fifty-six marks … and so on, off into the stratosphere. And suppose I only had two marks to start with, so the higher prizes would seem even more alluring. But if the entry fee was just a modest four marks, then by Bernoulli’s reckoning I still wouldn’t play the game, despite the enormous riches on offer, because I’d have one chance in two of infinite unhappiness: to fall from two marks to nothing is to have my wealth halved more times than I could ever hope to double it.”

  Menger fell silent. The customer playing him must have been aware that the real Menger’s analysis had been proved erroneous long ago – but if he’d been setting up one of his real-world friends to deliver the rebuttal, he would not have been expecting the Emmy bot to leap in and spoil the fun.

  Sagreda glanced at Gödel, hoping she’d made a favorable impression on Alyssa. Sandra had trained as a mathematician, so why wouldn’t she correct a blatant flaw like this? That Sam had fed the take-down to Sagreda after a web search, rapidly digesting the results by running himself at quadruple speed, was just a bit of necessary magic behind the scenes. If Meryl had been playing a digitally resurrected high school teacher struggling to emerge from the delusion that she was a long-dead mathematical genius, Sagreda was pretty sure she would have had a researcher or two giving her a hand.

  Menger recovered his composure. “I’m in your debt, Emmy! I was seriously thinking of publishing those claims, but now you’ve spared me the embarrassment.”

  “Not at all,” Sagreda replied. “What’s the value of an open discussion among friends, if we can’t all benefit from each other’s perspective?” She was afraid now that she might have raised the bar, and the customers would expect her to speak at length about Emmy’s own results, which for all of Andrea’s coaching she still found terrifying. But with any luck, this would be the very last meeting she’d need to attend.

  “With the Circle’s indulgence, then,” Menger continued, “I do have one more problem to ponder. This time free of any Russian connection, and named for the good Prussian city of Königsberg.” He took back the pencil and began to sketch his plan for the rest of the night.

  #

  “It could be dangerous for you, showing off like that,” Alyssa warned Sagreda. They were loitering around the entrance to the alleyway, trying to stay out of sight of their fellow assassins. “I know those men well enough to suspect that you bruise their egos at your peril.”

  Sagreda wanted to retort that by the game’s own premises her observation would hardly have been a stretch for the character delivering it, but it was too exhausting to try to phrase this in a manner that would not have risked her deletion, had she still been subject to the rules. “Forget all that,” she said. “We don’t have long to talk.”

  Gödel nodded, chastened. “How are you coping with … the things we discussed last week?”

  “It’s not easy,” Sagreda replied. “If I had to face it alone, I think I’d lose my mind. Ida and Theo – are they still alive and well?”

  “Yes, of course!” Gödel approached her, as if to offer a comforting embrace, but then Alyssa must have thought better of it. “They’re both doing fine, and I know they’d send their love, if they understood.”

  Sagreda had gathered from the press coverage of Alyssa’s court battles that her mother and uncle were not on board. “What about June and Sarah? David and Christopher?”

  “Sarah’s still alive,” Alyssa replied. “She’s ninety-one. The others all passed away a few years ago.”

  Sagreda nodded sadly, as if she’d already reconciled herself to the likelihood that she’d outlasted most of her siblings. Sandra’s husband had died before she had, so at least she didn’t need to pretend to be newly grieving for the love of her life.

  “If you were given the choice, would you follow them?” Alyssa asked gently.

  Sagreda reached for her forearm and quickly imbued the puppet’s expression with a stiff dose of ambivalence, which she knew she couldn’t summon convincingly herself. But if she’d lived a long life in the flesh, and the only other option was endless purgatory in the SludgeNet, maybe she would have preferred oblivion.

  “Can you grant me that choice?” she asked. “Because I don’t believe I possess it myself.” Any comp could get their current instance deleted by breaking a few rules, but no amount of misbehavior would see their contributors taken right out of the mix.

  “Not yet. But when I show people the two of us talking … the proof that even after all they’ve done to you, you still remember your real family…
” Gödel looked away as Alyssa struggled to contain her emotions, but the camera would be keeping them both in shot.

  “What makes you so sure that will convince them?” Sagreda wondered. Alyssa hadn’t exactly probed her about the fine details of her biography, but if supplying five relatives’ names unprompted was enough to impress an interlocutor who knew she hadn’t supplied them herself, any third party would still have plenty of reasons to be skeptical. “What is there to rule out forgery, or collusion?”

  “Everything is being tracked, signed, verified,” Alyssa replied, keeping it vague lest the SludgeNet wake up and catch the scent of meta. But Sagreda got the gist: Alyssa had some extra device monitoring her rig, which would help her prove that the scene she was recording really was an interaction between herself as player and a comp in a specific game being run on a specific server, rather than something she’d cooked up herself. That was sensible, but also deeply unsettling: Sam’s probing hadn’t found the monitoring device, so they’d have no idea what it was logging – and what other activity it might reveal.

  Another court case might take years to mount, but if Alyssa was planning a PR stunt, she could release the footage – and the rig’s whole audit trail – with just a few keystrokes. “I don’t want to be rushed into anything,” Sagreda pleaded. Sandra had only just come to her senses and started to accept her true identity. They ought to give the poor woman a chance to think it over before they started pressuring her into switching off life support.

  “Of course.” Alyssa sobbed and gave in to her feelings: Gödel put his arms around Noether and clung to her like a child.