“I want a coffium, but I want to sleep. Running on coffium. What was I saying? Immortality. It’s one thing to imagine a life of working to enrich some hereditary global power broker when you know you got eighty years on the planet, and so does he. Doesn’t matter how rich a fucker is, how many livers he buys on the black market, all it’s going to buy him is ten or twenty years. But the thought of making those greedy assholes into godlike immortals, bifurcating the human race into infinite Olympian masters and mayflies, so they not only get a better life than you could ever dream of, but they get it forever…”
She sighed. “They’re scared. They keep raising salaries, doesn’t matter. Offering benefits, doesn’t matter. Stock, doesn’t matter. A friend swears some zotta was trying to marry him into the family, just to keep him from defecting. These fuckers are willing to sell their kids for immortality. No matter what we do, they’ll eventually find enough lab-coats to deliver it. Science may be resistant to power, but it’s not immune. It’s a race: either the walkaways release immortality to the world, or the zottas install themselves as permanent god-emperors.”
They gave Iceweasel an air bed made out of a sponge with a lot of spring and a billion insulating holes. She unrolled it next to Gretyl’s, with that fluttery am-I-about-to-get-laid feeling, but by the time they’d both stripped and climbed into their sleep sacks—they snuck peeks, and caught each others’ eyes and smiled and looked again—she felt like weights were hanging on her limbs and eyelids.
The last thing she thought of was Gretyl’s race of permanent overlords, and how much her dad would love that idea.
*
After a week, everyone stopped walking stooped over, ready for the ceiling to cave in when the drones finished their work. The default commentariat figured out walkaway labs were being terminated with prejudice, and photos of fried corpses that made the rounds on the walkaway net leaked into default. The consensus was that a second strike against the underground campus—whose secrecy was never great and had slipped within days of the attack—was unlikely. Still, they devised evacuation drills.
It wasn’t medical supplies that filled the tunnels—it was computers. Abstractly, Iceweasel knew computers had mass. All the ones she’d consciously interacted with had been so small as to be invisible—a speck of electronics stuck to something big enough to handle with stupid human hands. Somewhere were air-conditioned, armored data centers full of computers, but they only appeared as plot elements in shitty gwot dramas. She assumed that these geometrically precise wind-tunnel buildings with bombproof bollards and monster chillers had the relationship to reality that Hollywood bank vaults had to real vaults.
Whether “real” data centers were neat, ranked terraces of aerodynamic hardware, that’s not how walkaways did them. The word went out across the region for compute-power. People came with whatever horsepower they had. They logged it with the master load-balancer, which all the top comp-sci types fiddled with. “Load-balancer” became a conjurer’s phrase, curse and invocation. Something was always wrong, but it did miracles, because the collection of motley devices, sprinkled around the tunnels, linked by tangles of fiber in pink rubber sheaths, delivered compute cycles that made Dis leap into consciousness.
Iceweasel’s workspace was near a tunnel exit where the heat wasn’t bad and she could watch the warring researcher clades. The comp-sci people always wanted to reboot Dis every time they found a new way of eking out another point of efficiency on the load-balancer; the cog sci people hated this because Dis was making breakthroughs in upload and simulation. Being liberated from the vagaries of the flesh and being able to adjust her mind’s parameters so she stayed in an optimal working state turned Dis into a powerhouse researcher.
It also made her miserable.
“I’m groundhog daying again, aren’t I?”
“Honestly? Yes. We had this conversation, word for word, last week.”
The cursor blinked. Iceweasel was convinced this was for dramatic effect. Dis could scan the logs of all their conversations in an eye blink, but when something emotionally freighted happened, there was a blinking delay. Iceweasel thought it was Dis’s lack of a body’s expressive range. She found herself interpreting the blinks—this one is a raised eyebrow, that one was a genuine shock, the third was a sarcastic oh-noes face. There were pictures of Dis’s human face in all these expressions and more—stern and lined, with dancing blue eyes; thick, mobile eyebrows and a hatchet-blade nose—but when Iceweasel thought of Dis’s face, she thought of that cursor, blink, blink, blink.
“So we did. Depressingly enough, I figured that it was a groundhog day moment at this point. I must bore you.”
“Not usually. I sometimes try out weird conversational gambits at these moments, to see how different your responses are. This is one of them, incidentally.”
Computer laughter was weird. Iceweasel felt a child’s pride in coming up with a joke that made her parents crack a smile. Dis’s laughter echoed through her earphones. “What’s your hypothesis? If I say the same thing no matter how you react, am I more or less of a person than if I vary my responses based on input? Conceptually, it doesn’t seem like either one would be harder to simulate—both are chatbot 101. We both know plenty of read-only people who always say the same thing no matter what we say.”
“I think you’re optimizing yourself to be tunnel-vision fixated on the cog sci sim work and you’re incapable of getting off the subject.”
“I see that we’ve done variations on this before.”
“Yeah.” Iceweasel didn’t add, and then you melt down.
When Dis told her about groundhog daying, named after the old movie, she’d underestimated the way the experience would play out for her, going through the same conversations over again, trying different gambits but ending up in the same place, with an incoherent, crashing sim.
“The literature on this is drawn from brain injuries, temporal lobe insults that nuke short-term memory. The videos are weird: every couple minutes, some old lady has the same conversation with her nurse or daughter: ‘Why am I in this hospital?’ ‘I’ve had a stroke? Was it bad?’ ‘How long have I been here?’ ‘What does the doctor say?’ ‘What do you mean, my memory?’ ‘You mean I’ve had this conversation with you before?’ ‘Every ninety seconds? That’s terrible!’ and then back to ‘Why am I in this hospital?’ Around we go.”
“Well, your loop lasts more like a day, and isn’t that banal.”
“You say the nicest things.”