“It’s interesting to see the differences between reboots. I can’t get over how cool you are with the idea of being annihilated between reboots. You can access the logs, but you wake up knowing that you’ve had a day wiped off the books, and it never slows you down. I get that you’re able to control that, but…”
“You really don’t understand. No offense. Back up to that read-only person who always answers the same: the reason that person is so frustrating is we know that people can change based on what they know. You’re not the same person you were when you got here ten days ago. If I asked you-minus-ten and you-now the same question, you wouldn’t be surprised if you gave a different answer. If I asked a battery of questions, you’d be surprised if you didn’t give different answers. The you that is you is actually the space of things that you might think in response to some stimulus.”
“The envelope.”
“You know this, but you don’t. When I come up clean, I’m only allowed to come up within the section of the envelope that doesn’t freak, which we can find, thanks to the lookahead. Imagine how life will be when everyone gets scanned regularly, when we build bodies that we can decant sims into to bring them to life. There’d be social pressure to not sweat the idea that it’s not ‘you’ in the sim, and anyone who suffers meat-death and comes back as a sim will only be brought up in the corner of the envelope that doesn’t freak and suicide. Give it a generation and there won’t be anyone alive cognitively capable of an existential crisis. I’m a fucking pioneer. Partly that’s because I’ve had years to get used to the idea that everything that makes you recognizable happened in the interactions of physical matter in your body, following physical rules from the universe.”
“I have a friend back at the B&B, a real hard-line walkaway. She’s always talking about how she’s not a special snowflake. I bet she’d love that: ‘you’re just meat following rules.’”
“Well, if you’re not meat following rules, what are you? A ghost? Of course you’re meat. The way you feel is determined by your gut, the hairs on your toes, your environment. I don’t have those things, so I am feeling differently from when I was meat. But when I was meat and forty, I felt differently from when I was meat and four. I have continuity with meat-me, what it remembered, that’s enough.”
Iceweasel’s eyes flicked to the timer. Dis’s cameras were acute enough to spot it. “I’m overdue for my four o’clock meltdown.” She’d had thirty hours of uptime and Iceweasel slept in fits, doing an hour or two of chatter with Dis for every three hours Dis spent with the researchers.
“You’re making progress. The work must be coming along.”
“You’re selling yourself short. The only person making progress around here is you, chickie. You play me like an organ. I watch your eyes when we’re talking, see you keeping track of my equilibrium, steering the conversation to keep me between the lines. I don’t know if you know you’re doing it. You’ve become the world’s greatest bot-whisperer. It was inevitable. Any time you give someone feedback and tell them to control it, their brains will find patterns in the system and optimize them. You’ve done it as sure as if I’d put you in a sim and written an app for your subconscious.”
Iceweasel felt her neck prickle. Dis was scary-smart, literally inhuman. Every now and again, Iceweasel had the impression she was being manipulated by the sim. “I thought you were going to say that it was my people skills.”
“Okay,” Dis said. “Raised by zottas, so you got a dose of the psychopath’s ability to make people want to like you even as you’re screwing them.” Back at the B&B, Iceweasel became expert at deflating criticism based on her rich parents. Dis treated it with the matter-of-fact brusqueness with which she conquered every subject. Nothing Iceweasel said made a dent in Dis’s rhetoric. “You hate it when I talk about your money,” Dis said. The sim had lots of cameras, and cycles to evaluate their data.
“No, I love being judged by my parents. Zottas are the only people it’s okay to be a racist about.”
“It’s not racism when you’re discriminated against for your choices.”
“I chose to walkaway.”
“But you identify enough to get shitty when I pass comment on their social tendencies.”
Iceweasel looked at the clock again. Dis busted her.
“Don’t worry, I’ll melt down soon. I’m feeling it. There’s something not right. I feel it from the moment I come up, like hamsters running on a wheel in here, chased by something they can’t see but know is in there. It’s hard to name, but the longer I’m up, the closer it comes—”
“It’s the no-body thing.” Iceweasel felt a shameful spurt of joy at being able to turn the screw on the sim.
“Fuck. I’m groundhog daying again.”
“You always talk about how you can never have a body, and even if you get a body, it won’t be your body, and you won’t have continuity with it.”
The cursor blinked like an accusation.
“I can see that. It’s the fucking lookahead. It can’t explore far enough into the envelope’s future to tell which possible me won’t have an existential breakdown.”
The cursor blinked.
“Oh God, it’s such a terrible feeling.”
The infographics were crazy, redlining and jigjagging in pure glitch-aesthetic. Iceweasel had been here, but it didn’t get easier. The slide from lucidity into terror was quick, and the worst part was that the cog sci types insisted that it run its course, all simulation data being captured for analysis. They couldn’t switch her off or roll her back to an earlier state. They had to let her disintegrate.
“It’s such a terrible feeling. Everything I’ve just said, it’s bullshit. There’s no continuity. I’m not me. I’m just me enough to know that I’m not me. Without a body, without embodiment, I’m a Chinese room. You pass words into me, and a program decides what words I’d pass back and generates them. The Chinese room has just enough accuracy to know how terrifying the real me, the me that can never come back, would find that. Oh, Iceweasel—”
The cursor flashed. The infographics went nonlinear. Iceweasel swallowed a lump.
“It’s okay, Dis. You’ve been here before.”
The infographics jittered. Iceweasel wondered if she’d gone nonverbal. That happened, though not usually this quickly.
The computer made a noise Iceweasel had never heard. Weird. Unearthly. A scream.
Iceweasel’s nerve shattered. She fled.
[v]
The klaxon roused her, and she was on her feet before full consciousness, shedding her sleep sack and kicking her feet into tough clogs. She blinked. There was no proper diurnal rhythm underground. If enough people wanted a sleep cycle, they’d find a side corridor, roll out mats, turn out the lights, and close the door. But most of them had converged a common day/night anyway, and there were other people around her in blinking incomprehension.
Gretyl was the first to move, prodding the wall to find out what was going on.
“Bad guys,” she said. “Two. Armed like mercenaries. Came in through the rock-door.”