“You’re saying—”
“I’m saying that if someone with more money than God took it into his head to destroy you, it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything exceptional. It could be trophy hunting.”
Gretyl stood, stretched her arms over her head. The movement made Iceweasel’s back ache in sympathy. There’d been a toll on her muscles from the hard days.
“I suppose,” she said. Everyone knew that Iceweasel was a poor little rich girl. It was the worst-kept non-secret on campus.
It felt like they were staring at her, judging her. She knew she should be wary of sleep-deprivation paranoia, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was a permanent outsider.
Tam said, “Whether it’s rational, the fact remains that someone out there thinks we’re worth killing. We should have been moving constantly, not waiting for the axe. If your vivisectionist buddies use those two for medical experiments, we’ll be dead meat everywhere—and so will every other walkaway. Some things are just not done. Notwithstanding our endless capacity for kidding ourselves that it’s different when we do it, some things are just not done.”
Gretyl kept supreme cool. Her inability to be ruffled fascinated Iceweasel. She was such a fucking Earth goddess. “What makes you think anyone would find out?”
Tam got in her face. “Don’t be stupid, stupid. We leak. Everyone knows everything we do. Half of it is on a fucking wiki. There’s gonna be at least one spy around here. More.”
“Could be you,” Gretyl said, pretending that Tam’s lips weren’t millimeters from her nose. “Maybe you’ve come here to spy on us to freak us out. Or maybe you’re going native, and you’re warning us because you’ve got inside dope on the next strike. Maybe that’s why you want to nuke those two, because you’re sure that they’ll out you.”
“That’s not an entirely stupid way of thinking,” Tam said, and smiled. Gretyl smiled. “At least you’re trying situation-appropriate paranoia. But what about your girlie here?” she said, jerking a thumb at Iceweasel.
“Don’t you think I’m a bit obvious to be a mole? The zottas aren’t stupid.”
“Fake-out,” Tam shot back. She smiled and Iceweasel told the voice in her head this meant it was a joke, but all Iceweasel could think was “ha ha, only serious.” “They know you’re so obvious you’d never be suspected.”
“That is the kind of stupid thing someone who thought he was Lex Einstein would come up with. But it’s not true.”
“Which is exactly what you’d—”
Iceweasel’s wrist buzzed. She checked in. “Got to go. We’ll do this later.”
*
They were only steps behind her as she ran for the cog sci lab. CC waited for her, but she breezed past and went to the wall.
She wasn’t a scientist, trained to read infographics, but even she could see there was something different.
“Hey there, beautiful,” said Dis’s voice. The words appeared on the screen, trailing tails of analytics. The trails had fewer angry warnings.
There was a tachometer dial Iceweasel had learned to pay close attention to—available cycles on the cluster—running the sim. It was further into the green than she’d seen it while the sim was running.
“Hey, Dis. Did you get an upgrade? You’ve got more headroom than you know what to do with.”
“Course I do. We did it. Or rather, I did it.”
“Did what?” But she knew. It was there. You didn’t need to be an expert to interpret the infographics.
“Solved it. I’m stable—metastable. I can self-regulate. Not only that, I can self-regulate without conscious effort—without even knowing I’m doing it. There’s a lookahead subroutine below my conscious threshold, dialed way down, hardly branching ahead at all, it nudges the me that’s aware of being me into the groove.”
“So you’re saying—”
“I’m saying I did it. It was there all along, but it took so much tweaking. I was constrained because I crashed every time I fucked up. That kept me stuck in local maximum. So the last time I booted, I constrained my consciousness to the narrowest possible sim, nothing human in it, just blind heuristics, and managed to traverse the valley of crashitude and scale a new peak. It’s generalizable, too—I think now there’s an existence proof, I’ll be able to do it again. You get that, Iceweasel, you bot-whisperer? I’m going to knock the compute-time to execute a sim down by two orders of magnitude. We’re about to get a fuck-load more bots. As in, no one will ever have to die again.”
“Except to the extent they’re actually dead, right?”
“A technicality. You know how this works. The only stable state you can boot a sim into is one where it doesn’t have a meltdown about being a sim. Maybe there’s some six-sigma fraction of the general population who have no possibility of that, and they’ll be dead forever, but for anyone who has even the narrowest possibility-space for coping with existential angst, there will never be any reason to die, ever. Fuck you, Prometheus, we have stolen fire from the fucking gods!”
The infographics showed nominal. Performance metrics robust. What’s more, the slightly off-kilter, self-reflexive messianic tone of the bot sounded more like the Dis everyone had told Iceweasel about than the sim ever had. She wasn’t sure if she bought the Turing thought-experiment that intelligence could recognize intelligence, but nevertheless it was hard to remember that whatever she was talking to wasn’t exactly a human being.
“Dis,” she said, and found to her horror that she had choked up. There were tears on her cheeks, too. “Dis, this is—”
“I know,” the simulation said. “It makes it all different now.”
*
Tam buttonholed her as she walked away. Gretyl stayed behind with the cog sci people to pick apart the lookaheads and figure out what was going on down on the bare metal.
“You know what this means?”
“What?”
“The end of history,” Tam said. “The end of morality, of everything. If you can live forever—come back from the dead—anything goes. Suicide bombing. Mass murder. That’s why the zottas are so freaked out by everyone having it. They know that if only a few of them control it, they’ll manage it carefully. Not because they’re good, but because a small number of immortal aristocrats will agree on how to ensure their sweet deal never ends.
“But once everyone’s got it—”
“Wait,” Iceweasel said. Her eyes itched from crying. She didn’t know why she’d been crying. “What the fuck are you talking about? Why are you here if that’s what you think?”