Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [304]
‘And many of them were once like you! An ordinary human being, whose brain had been recorded, neurone by neurone, synapse by synapse in an infiltrating matrix of smart matter. Recorded, and replicated, and run on superior hardware with a success which you are right now in the ideal position to appreciate.’
He laughed. Something in his tone chilled me, a cynicism as deep and mature as that sentiment is usually shallow and callow.
‘You may be wondering why I am not among them. Of course, you have no good reason to assume I’m not. But, as it happens – I’m not. You may also be wondering what you’re doing, haunting the onboard computer of a maintenance robot made not from smart matter but from what we now call “dumb mass’”.
‘The answer, for my part, is complicated. For yours, it’s simple. You are among the dead. Yes, my dumb-mass friend, at least one copy of your good self is coded in a few cubic centimetres of smart matter, pending a future resurrection in a better place. That belongs to you, to the real you. We’ll keep our part of the deal. But the copy you are now belongs, for now, to us.’
A chill smile.
‘Next question,’ Reid went on. ‘Why? Well, for those of you who weren’t in on the deal or don’t remember it: a few years back, when this was all being set up, we didn’t have the time or the resources to develop AIs that were just smart enough to build the station but not so smart they caused trouble. Knocking off copies of the copied human minds and running them at pre-conscious levels of integration was the quickest and cheapest way to get the software for our construction robots. We quickly found that these minds – you lot – would unpredictably become integrated after a variable length of time on the job. They’d wake up, and when they did they tended to crack up, not surprisingly. So we’ve provided comfortable virtual realities as a standby, so you don’t feel you’ve been turned into a robot.
‘But, like it or not, you’re stuck with it for now. Like Guevara’s ideal Socialist Man, you’re “a cog in the machine, but a conscious cog”. However – unlike Socialist Man – you have some individual incentives, though whether they could be called material incentives is debatable. If you decide to make the best of your situation, you’ll be paid with increasingly enhanced and enjoyable virtual realities, expansions of your mental capacities and so on, to the point where you’ll be ready to move permanently into the macro on your release, if that’s what you want. It’ll be like dying and going to heaven. Or if you prefer, you can be resurrected in your human body, when the time comes.
‘If you don’t accept any of this – well, you’ll find instructions on the computer in the other room. It’ll work, now that you’ve seen this, ah, orientation package. It can put you right back where you were before you woke up. You’ll have lost an hour or two of experience, that’s all. Next time you wake up, you’ll remember nothing of this, and you may find yourself better able to handle it…Then again, you might not. It’s up to you.’
Reid’s image gave an incongruously cheery smile and disappeared, to be replaced by a screen-saving shot of the turning planet outside and a message: For further information, press the first button again.
I sat and thought for a while.
The message had changed nothing. There was no way for me to determine which, if any, of my speculations about my experiences was true. All I knew was that some part of my environment was a simulation, and that somebody wanted me to believe it was that part of it which, in all everyday experience, would have been unthinkingly accounted real. I began to