“Disjointed,” CC said, “you’re freaking. We can tell. Look, I’m going to bring you back up again, okay? Do you have any parameter suggestions for our next try?”
“How much power have you got left? Could you do a longer lookahead next? We’ve run this scenario before and we were able to keep the model stable.”
“You were alive then,” CC said. The infographics blossomed into frantic motion.
“Wrong thing to say,” Iceweasel said, quietly. Gretyl and Sita nodded.
“Dis! Dis!” Sita said. “It’s Sita.”
“I know it’s Sita.” It lacked the expressive range to be snappish, but the word-choice and cadence left no doubt. “What is it?”
“We’re going to be running at minimal power for a month while we tank up—longer, depending on wind and sun. Assuming they don’t bomb us. There’s not enough juice to do the lookahead you want, not unless we clock you down to half speed.”
“That won’t work. At half speed, I won’t be able to carry on social interaction with you. Express ticket to a head-crash.”
Iceweasel whispered to Sita: “What about those analytics? Why don’t you just come up with some kind of homeostatic code that tries to keep all parameters within range?”
“Because I’m nonlinear, that’s why,” the voice said. Iceweasel supposed that in addition to the phased-array optics on the surface, the Disjointed bot could access an array of mics, meaning she could tune into any conversation in the room. Iceweasel had thrown parties in Toronto where her big wall was fed off of some other rich kid’s party, and had been able to pick out every conversation individually just by pointing. The bot she was talking to through the screen could do the same.
“I’m not deterministic. Otherwise they wouldn’t have to do lookahead to keep me from losing my shit. I’m sensitive to initial parameters and prone to singularities. So are you. That’s what defines us. Or you. I don’t know what defines me anymore. Oh.” There was another blink-cursored pause. None of this had been in any of the upload dramas Iceweasel watched. She’d gone through a phase, dumb shows about people who put their brains into computers and became multifarious—Multifarious was the name of the most successful one, and it had sold to some zotta for like nine billion dollars, with merchandising rights—but she’d gotten sick of them.
It was because she’d co-binged on ancient movies about space travel and realized all those dramatic situations about getting into space were wish-fulfillment and/or parochial fearmongering, and the same had to be true of upload-fi. Whatever that stuff ended up looking like and whatever problems it would have, they would be weirder and less showy than the videos.
“I get that.” Whatever was in the university yogurt, it wasn’t working. Iceweasel had major social anxiety. Everyone was looking and judging. They probably were, of course. Why had she opened her stupid mouth?
Hanging around Limpopo had taught her you never looked stupid for asking basic questions in good faith. “The thing I really don’t get is why you’re okay with being rebooted—isn’t that dying?”
Everyone was still looking. “Of course. It’s exactly like dying, but I know I’ll be back. There’s selective pressure at boot-time. Think of it—when we’re booting a sim like me, it starts off primitive, and we can lookahead at low compute-cost to figure out parameters for each successive step to full consciousness.” Pause, cursor-blink. “Or whatever I have. One of the key questions each of those lookahead versions of me is being asked is, ‘Will you have an existential crisis when you realize that you’re a simulation?’ The possible ‘me’s’ with highest tolerance for being a head-in-a-jar have the best fitness factors for fully spawning. I’m emergent and complex, but within the envelope of all possible responses I might have to this situation is not melting down, so that’s the corner of the envelope we explore when we boot me up.
“You’re thinking, ‘Fine, but how can you call that a simulation, if you can only simulate the rare circumstances in which the thing being simulated doesn’t have a conniption and crash?’ But fuck that. Now we can do this, it’s going to be a matter of time until the dead outnumber the living, and all the dead will be the versions of themselves that don’t have existential fits. It’s a cognitive bottleneck we’re going to squeeze the human race through—”
“I wasn’t thinking that at all,” Iceweasel said. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re a person and whatever you’re thinking is your own damned business.”
“If you weren’t thinking that, you probably aren’t very bright. No offense.”
CC broke in: “Don’t be an asshole, Dis.”
“I’m not being an asshole. I just don’t understand how a meat-person can contemplate what I’ve become without a smidge of existential angst. It’s not natural.”
Iceweasel couldn’t help laughing. It was the nervous exhaustion, not to mention the wonderment, and it bent her double.
To her amazement, the bot laughed, too. The weirdest thing about the synthetic laugh was how natural it sounded. More natural than speech.
“Okay, screw natural. Stranger, I am a freak and so are you and we’re both kinked by our computing platform. What’s your point?”
“I know I’m not an expert, but if you’re prepared to live within your, uh, ‘constrained envelope’ to keep from suiciding as soon as you boot, what’s wrong with constraining your envelope a little more? Just knock the edges off your virtual endocrinology and streamline yourself so that you can have the stability to come up with a less-constrained way of running. Your brain got incinerated, this sim is all that’s left. Back it up, freeze it as it is now, then take an axe to a copy, brute-force it into a mode where it stays metastable even if that means straying outside of what is considered to be ‘you.’ You’ve just explained that the only ‘you’ that can wake in the sim is one that’s okay with being rebooted periodically. How’s that different from booting a version that’s okay with being whittled down to a robotically cool version of itself?”
Everyone looked from the blinking cursor to her and back. The infographics danced. There was one she’d sussed, a go/no-go tachometer that represented the model’s overall stability. It was greenish. Greener. The cursor blinked. CC was doing something in a corner where there was more complex stuff, numbers and tables.
“You are not a total fucking idiot.”
“That’s high praise, coming from Dis,” Sita said. They joined in with the computer’s laugh.