“Sounds familiar.”
“That was just for starters. Stalin insisted they could weatherproof wheat by growing it in shitty conditions. That ended badly. Famine. Millions dead.”
“But now we can, uh, ‘hack Lysenkoism’?”
“We have cultural as well as genetic traits. We pass them on. When we come up with a society like default, it selects for people who are wasteful jerks that succeed by stabbing their neighbors in the back, even though we’ve got a species-wide priority of not going extinct through environmental catastrophe, pandemic, and war.”
They wound up and up the hill. The snow was just as deep, but there weren’t trees to avoid, so the going was easier. Still, Limpopo was getting puffed out, to her embarrassment. Sita, fifteen years older, showed no sign of slowing, so Limpopo swallowed her pride and called for a rest. They were over the tree line and could see over it deep into the basin, the weird tunnel-scape of the spacies, the rotting houses and farms colonized by small trees that just pierced the snow.
“Wow,” Limpopo said, not subjecting her laboring lungs to anything longer.
“Indeed. So, Lysenkoism. With the sims, we can make Lysenkoism work. Think of Dis inside her constraint envelope. We’ve brainwashed her—or helped her brainwash herself—to be fine with being a simulation.”
A cold feeling spread in Limpopo’s gut. She looked at Sita with horror. “You’re not talking about turning people into sims who aren’t moved by natural beauty?”
Sita stared through her face mask. “Oh girl, no. Jesus, you think I’m a monster? We could constrain our sims to spaces where we value nature so much that we prefer to be disembodied and not a force for its destruction, to experiencing it directly.”
“That’s just weird.”
They moved again. Two switchbacks later, Limpopo said, “I think I’ve got that. That is some fucked up shit.”
“For hundreds of years, people have been trying to get everyone to live gently on the land, but their whole pitch was, ‘hold still and try not to breathe.’ It was all hair-shirt, no glory in nature’s beauty. The environmental prescription has been to act as much as possible like you were already dead. Don’t reproduce. Don’t consume. Don’t trample the earth or you’ll compress the dirt and kill the plants. Every exhalation poisons the atmosphere with CO2. Is it any wonder we haven’t gotten there?
“We know there’s truth in it. It’s all around us. You can only act like the planet is infinite—like wishful thinking trumped physics—for so long before it goes to shit. That’s why Cape Canaveral is a SCUBA site. Think about it too long and you’ll come to the conclusion that nothing you do matters. It’s either kill yourself now or kill your descendants just by drawing breath.
“Now we’ve got a deal for humanity that’s better than anything before: lose the body. Walk away from it. Become an immortal being of pure thought and feeling, able to travel the universe at light speed, unkillable, consciously deciding how you want to live your life and making it stick, by fine-tuning your parameters so you’re the version of yourself that does the right thing, that knows and honors itself.”
They came to a ruined building, a vast refinery or processing plant, big as an aerodrome, two great cave-ins marring the roofline.
Sita gestured at it. “A couple years without maintenance and it just imploded. It’s the climate control. Place like that, unless you build it air-and vapor-tight, give it a Q factor like a space suit, it’ll cost you more to heat than you could make by running it. That stuff needs climate control or it starts to trap moisture, and come summer it rots. The next winter it’s worse. A couple years later, boom, it’s rubble. That thing was a giant computer that housed people and machines, and when they turned the computer off, it was an instant tear-down.
“The universe hates us. We are temporary violations of the second law of thermodynamics. We push entropy off to the edges, but it’s patient, and it builds, and when we take our eyes off of it, kerblam, it’s back with a vengeance.
“You want to change the history of the future, give us a chance for a life worth living, without oppression? There’s only one way. You know it, but you can’t make yourself face it.”
“But I could if I was a sim? Nudge the sliders until I was in the envelope that loved being simulated?”
“Bingo. We’d have a world that belonged to animals, and we’d experience it through sensors that perfectly simulated our wet stuff, but without crushing all those precious roots.”
“Can I make a suggestion?”
“Go ahead.”
“When you make this pitch, don’t mention Lysenko. Making the world a better place by realizing the failed dreams of the pet mad scientist of one of history’s greatest monsters—”
“Duh.”
“Just saying.”
“The point isn’t Lysenko or Stalin. It’s the angels of our better natures. Everything we know we should do but can’t bring ourselves to do because the part of us that sees the whole map and knows it’s the way to go can’t convince the part that’s in the driver’s seat. It’s about being able to choose, make the choice stick.”
“What if someone else chooses for you?”
“If someone else gets control over your sliders? Disaster. Teetotal capsizement. Terror without historical parallel. Better make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“I get the feeling that you’ve already planned this argument, Sita. An ambush.”
“Not an ambush,” she said. “Just the marketplace of ideas. We’re getting somewhere, something is brewing that’s going to bubble over. We’re part of it. I want to get everyone ready for it, so there’s a minimum of headless chickening.”
Limpopo remembered arguments with Jimmy about the way the world was about to change and how she had to face it, how he’d offered to put her in charge if she backed him. It was so nakedly manipulative that she’d never been tempted. Is that what Sita was doing? If so, why wasn’t her back up?
“One more question.”
“As many as you’d like, Limpopo.”
“Just one. Then I want to go back to enjoying nature.”
“Shoot.”
“Why do we have differing levels of executive control over our minds? Why would we evolve to foil our own better natures?”