“Because evolution isn’t directed. It’s not streamlined. We’re an attic stuffed with everything our ancestors found useful, even if it stopped being useful thousands of years ago. Unless it makes you have fewer babies, it hangs around in the genome. Being out of control of your rational priorities certainly increases the number of babies you’ll make.”
Limpopo laughed in spite of herself, despite Sita having obviously used that line before. “All that stuff in the attic, it’s useful, right? That’s why the attics themselves haven’t been squeezed out by evolution. Having a statistically normal distribution across every trait—including the ability to make up your mind and stick to it—means that as a species we’re able to face a variety of challenges. We’ve got a tool for every occasion, genomically speaking.”
“Can I interrupt you?”
“Of course.”
“This isn’t a new argument. There’s a whole neurodiversity contingent who hate my ideas of sliders, and want to preserve our incapacity to ‘make up your mind and stick to it’ in case there’s some hypothetical species-destroying crossroads in the future where we need to rescue it. I say, you keep your irrationality intact. I’ll switch mine off. Other people can make up their own minds. Because the inability to see reason is a species-destroying crossroads and we’re at it now. If we don’t figure out how to put off gratification today for survival tomorrow, to beat the solipsist’s delusion that you’re a special snowflake—”
“Okay, I know how this goes.”
“I know you do.”
They picked through the ruins, over huge machines under their blankets of snow and treacherous piles of rubble that could be used as wobbly staircases to reach the remains of the roof and odd preserved relics, including a manager’s station with a faded set of laminated safety memos tacked around its missing observation window.
“If it turns out the level of executive control we get from sims backfires, we’ll just turn it off. That’s the point of executive control: deciding what you’re going to do.”
“What about the existential crises?”
“What?”
“Iceweasel told me that Dis kept suiciding—”
“Crashing.”
“Terminally freaking. Until you figured out how to constrain her to versions of herself that wouldn’t have existential crises.”
“Yeah…” She sounded cautious. Limpopo sensed weakness.
“You can’t simulate someone unless you turn down the slider that freaks out at the thought of being simulated.”
“Yes…” Deeper caution.
“What happens if you ditch your bodies, upload, and it turns out the human race can’t survive without whatever makes us terrified of losing our bodies?”
“That is perverse.”
“It’s not. It’s not hard to think of an aversion to having a body-ectomy as pro-survival. What if you’re engineering the mass suicide of the human race?”
“All you’ve got is a hypothetical. I’ve got a concrete risk: we are in the midst of mass suicide. If it turns out turning off our existential terror makes us give up hope and switch ourselves off, we’ll deal with that when it arrives. Come on, Limpopo, be serious.”
The rebuttal was so hot, so different from the argument thus far, Limpopo knew she’d touched something tender. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. When people got like this, you couldn’t convince them of anything. She wished for a way to turn off Sita’s anxiety, a slider she could dial to a middle ground where Sita could confront her anxieties without freaking. Sita wished she had one, too.
[vii]
“Hello, Jacob,” Natalie said. She hadn’t called him that before, but Dad wouldn’t cut it. Her father gripped the foot of her bed while the door’s locks cycled, clunk-clunk.
“I don’t like this, you know.”
“Then let’s stop it. You untie me and let me go, and we’ll part ways. Not every family stays a family forever. I’ll send you a Christmas card every year and I’ll come to the funeral. No hard feelings.”
He looked wounded. That might have been partly genuine, which was amazing, considering that she was in four-point restraint. The moment passed.
“Your mother and sister want to visit.”
She rolled her eyes. Dis had been her constant companion since she’d awoken in the bolt-hole. Without her, Natalie imagined she would have been in quite a weakened state, desperate for company. Solitary confinement was officially torture. She ping-ponged between a conviction Dis was a traitor and the possibility Dis was genuinely on her side, but even that state of indeterminacy was a chewy mental problem that kept her sane.
“It’s not like I could stop them.”
He pursed his lips. “Don’t be difficult—” She suppressed a snort. “I can’t bring them in while you’re like this.”
She couldn’t suppress the second snort. “You make it sound like I tied myself up.”
“What the fuck else was I supposed to do? Natalie, I’m being gentle with you. Do you know what other parents do with kids who run away with your friends? Do you have any idea what that kind of deprogramming looks like?”
“I have a pretty good idea. I remember Lanie.”
Lanie Lieberman was her best friend until the year they turned thirteen, when Lanie went off-piste, sneaking away for daring encounters with boys, booze, and the kind of club where the bouncers let a thirteen-year-old in if she dressed right and came with the right louche rich boy. They’d grounded her, put trackers on her, droned her, put a bodyguard on her, then two, but Lanie was a Houdini—especially with help from scumbag kid-fiddling older boys from families even richer than hers, who had their own money for the countermeasures Lanie needed to get away.
After that, it had been private school, then military school, then a place for troubled kids, and finally a place whose name Lanie never spoke. It was the only one she couldn’t escape from. Judging from her pallor when she returned, it had been underground or somewhere far north. In Natalie’s imagination it was an abandoned mine or a stretch of tundra. The Lanie who came back from it was … hinky. Not just wounded, but cross-wired in a terrifying, mystifying way. Sad things sometimes made her laugh. When other people laughed, she’d get a look of concentration and anger, she had to keep her rage in check.
They stopped pretending they were friends by fifteen. At sixteen, Lanie got early admission to a university no one had heard of in Zurich, supposed to be an amazing boot up in the finance industry, where even math dumbos could learn to be high-flying quants. The last Natalie heard of her was a hand-delivered invitation to her father’s funeral, a neat ink signature below the engraving. Natalie didn’t go to the funeral and couldn’t imagine the database cross-section that spit out her name as a potential attendee.
Her dad smiled wanly. “Things have come a long way since the days of Lanie Lieberman. There’s trade shows for what we could be doing right now. I made two discreet queries and now I get brochures on rag paper so thick it could shingle the roof. Natalie, you’re a growth industry, and the methodology is faster, more ruthless and more effective than anything from back then. Thumbscrews versus psychoanalysis.”