“What about Limpopo, Kersplebedeb?”
“We’ve been making scans, starting back with a bunch of scientists and, weirdly, two random mercs at Walkaway U; then more at the B&B, and more in Space City. They’re all different, made using different post-processing, different calibration, different gear, different everything. There are walkaways all over the world trying to make scans, everyone’s got their own ideas about it. It’s a mess. This working group came up with a standard way of encapsulating the data and preflighting it to see whether it was likely to run in a given sim. It’s a confidence measure for every brain in a bottle, a single number that represents whether we know how to bring you back to life.”
“Sounds sensible. Things were chaotic when I got scanned. So Limpopo’s scan isn’t as good as you’d hoped?”
“Your scan is a nine point eight. Hers is a one point seven-six.”
“Shit. Scale of ten, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit. Boy am I fucking glad I’m a sim and there’s code keeping me numb. There’s a part of me that knows that this news makes me want to fucking suicide, thinking of eternity as a brain in a jar while Limpopo is dead forever.”
“It’s not quite that. I know what you feel. No one’s heard from Iceweasel in months. Her backup is a two point four. That number doesn’t represent the likelihood we’ll ever be able to run a sim; it represents the likelihood we can run it right now. The problem of modeling human consciousness on computerized substrates is the big one, one that we’ve been prodding at the edges of for years. There’s practically a religion, all that Singularity stuff they used to talk about. We’ve had a breakthrough, it’s led to a couple of spectacular successes, including you, including this conversation. But the most important thing about that breakthrough isn’t what we can do now that we didn’t used to be able to do—it’s the fact that we are making progress. What’s more likely, we’ve just found the only breakthrough out there, or this was just the first of many breakthroughs?”
“I don’t know which. No one does. It’s a data-set with one point. A breakthrough.” But Etcetera sounded excited. His infographics confirmed it.
“It’s more. You know we got Dis’s sim running by simulating her imperfectly? Her busted, unstable sim contributed to the stable version. From here on in, there’s going to be more eminent, legendary scientists who’ve devoted their lives to this running as sims, able to run multiple copies of themselves, to back up different versions of themselves and recover from those backups if they try failed experiments, able to think everything they used to be able to think with their meat-brains and also to think things they never could have thought.
“We’ve designed the mechanical computers that’ll help us build electronic calculators that’ll help us build fully programmable computers. We’ve built the forge that’ll let us make the tools that’ll let us build the forge that’ll let us make better tools that’ll let us build the forge—”
“I get it. I thought sims were prone to infinite recursion. Being a meat-person must totally suck.”
“It does.” She heaved a sigh. “I wish I could paramaterize my brain, keep it from veering off into bad territory. I miss her so much.”
Kersplebedeb put his arms around her. She let him, rested her head on his skinny chest, smelling his boy-smell, tinged with lichen tequila and lentilish vegan fungus-culture. She didn’t let people hug her often, but she should. She missed this.
[ii]
“Wake up.” Nadie shook her shoulder. Iceweasel curled into a ball, but it was hopeless. Nadie wasn’t a merc anymore, but she could be persuasive.
Nadie prodded her in the ribs. When she covered the spot, she gave her another poke in the tummy. She looked at her tormentor. “This better be important.”
“You’re going to love this.” She sat down at the foot of Iceweasel’s bed. It was a familiar design—a self-assembling Muji bed, identical to the sort she’d liberated on the night she’d met Seth and Etcetera; its plans were a downloadable. It was a walkaway staple. It hardly creaked as it took Nadie’s weight.
Iceweasel ground her fists into her eyes and struggled into a sitting position, focusing on Nadie, who, for a change, wore a macroexpression: a shit-eating grin.
“What is it?”
“Take this.” She handed Iceweasel a long-stemmed plastic glass, warm from the printer. She bent down and played with something at the foot of the bed that clinked and sloshed, then came up with an improbable bottle of champagne, real champagne, with the Standard & Poors & M?et & Chandon labels she remembered from New Year’s parties with the Redwater cousins. Using the tail of her forest-green, shimmering tee, she eased out the cork with more grace than Iceweasel had seen anyone manage, filled up her glass and another from the floor.
They clinked glasses. Iceweasel drank vintage champagne at seven in the morning, in a tiny walkaway room, one of dozens strung around the rafters of a vast, abandoned factory outside South Bend, with an ex-merc. The weirdest part: she understood it.
“Paperwork came through?”
Nadie drained the rest of the champagne, letting it run down her muscular throat, smiled wolfishly, tossed the glass out the window and guzzled out of the bottle as the glass clattered indestructibly on the far-below factory floor.
“Congratulations, zotta, you’re a rich woman.”
It had been a rough couple of months, as Nadie’s attorneys worked through the Ontario courts, then a Federal challenge. Twice, Nadie disappeared for weeks, heading to God-knows-where to be deposed by Fair Witnesses whose discretion was supposedly an article of faith, though Iceweasel was sure Nadie relied more on her opsec than the Fair Witnesses’ professional code.
The first time Nadie went, she’d sat with Iceweasel and described, in blood-curdling detail, the armies of mercs hunting them, the tremendous resources they’d brought to bear. There were vast surveillance nets sucking up every packet that traversed both the main walkaway trunks and the most highly connected default nodes, looking for a variety of keywords, anything that could be fingerprinted as characteristic of Iceweasel or her previous network access, which had been retrieved from the inconceivably vast databases of captured net-traffic. From her typing patterns to the habitual order in which she visited her favorite sites to the idiosyncrasies of her grammar, syntax, and punctuation, the surveillance-bots were sieving the network torrents for her.