Chapter 3


Like a government shopping mall, Central Planning was the region's main meeting place. A massive entrance dominated the east side of the building. Community leaders came here to prove they really existed, and the university studied them. Visitors wore lie detectors to encourage them to be themselves. Slogans like EXPAND THE ECONOMY crawled across the wall.
  They passed groups of Fam members waiting for a water rights debate. Rick had expected a tribal look, but this was not the past. Most members looked drab, with subtle differences between functional work clothes. A few wore a style riot of forgettable patterns and colors. One woman was draped in a silver sheet.
  Lino strode through the crowd, telling people to work harder. In reality he often wanted them to loosen up. His guests recalled elaborate speeches he had never given. Tagging along, Rick felt part of it all, as if he helped make it happen. A motionless security guard stared back.
  The university tried to simplify complex logic. Math was often easy to understand, but hard to do. Trainer software could replace bad habits with slightly better ones. It had even helped Rick walk better, shifting his muscle memory toward the average.
  Past sliding glass doors, they entered a technical area. He smelled microns in the air like cigarette smoke, still the sweetest perfume. A tiny robot shot through a vacuum tube along the ceiling, appendages blurring so fast it stung his eyes. He saw abstract supercomputers, and shelves of cylindrical mainframes like rows of urns.
  They stopped before a window into a sealed room, meant to be a special place. Ceiling grids cast a cold diamond light. Behind the glass, a big sphere was hidden by coolant mist, a future toy with colorful diodes. No one could really control it. Wires radiated from the geodesic globe, suspending the one ton mass.
  "Our Optic-X has one exabyte of free memory," Lino explained. "Anyone can time-share. Semicons still have the brute force to uphold whatshisname's Law. They'll be around, like our brains." He looked at the globe. It could do so much more.

  With a flurry of synthesizer music, Rick followed him into a crowded chamber. The cool air was energizing. A band of light circled the wall like endless morning.
  "Keeps us awake," Lino said in an empathic moment. They could control anything here.
  The engineers looked as casual as gang members, busy surfing the eyewall. When Rick entered their territory no one looked up. The room was filled with control panels, mountains of hardware and colored wires, a rare sight. Robots were at work, tiny screwdrivers whirring in a forest of parts. No human could make something this ugly. Some of the layout was only hours old. Other areas had minimal controls that faded at the edges. A group of technicians held a meeting in a blue beam. A Lucidspace box was in use, its occupant covered by a plastic hood. The chairs were designed for people who spent a lifetime without natural light. This floor even had a small motel, a bar, and a tiny indoor park.
  Lino spoke as if over a roar. "We're doing an Omega simulation."
  "Why?" Rick asked in the same tone. He had lost his sense of direction.
  Lino stopped and pointed at a flickering monitor wall, their balance shifting before the static. Chaos looked the same at any scale, but every dot had a meaning. Man was too smart to understand his own creations, a god to himself.
  The image pulled away. Denser island galaxies appeared at the edges. A mind made by a committee. They had very little in common with it.
  Rick couldn't quite recall Wang's Unified Mind Theory, but he would never forget the first time he understood it, the deepest thought of his life. Wang couldn't explain his mysterious insight, which had arrived one second after he woke up. It had saved a dysfunctional field. AI's would have happened sooner by banning all research.
  Rick stepped back. There it was, part of his universe. It would have been easier to create a talking dog. Permian mammal-like reptiles had complex brains, but 250 million years later they still hadn't been intelligent.
  "That thing is supposed to replace us?" Rick asked.
  "They think so," Lino replied. Humans were finished.
  The AI Ethics Committee was the only group more paranoid than the UN. Until now, mankind's problems had been self-limiting. Once computing costs dropped to negative, fifteen minutes of the wrong simulation, running quietly in an empty room, could be worse than a world war. By the end of the century, all human suffering would be reproducible in one second, at a cost of one cent.
  The Math Center was currently licensed to hold 25% of the AI skill set. Their specialty was pattern recognition. They observed the local Fams, looking for common-sense facts too obvious for humans to notice; the art of doing nothing. The Lifeskills database tracked entire lives in detail.
  "This is Ortef," Lino said. "AI number 2311, on Space Station Centauri. I've had the pleasure of knowing it well. Right now it's cut off from the real world, exploring our simulation. The Net Czar asked to borrow our system, and we were delighted to oblige."
  Rick couldn't see the walls from here, another illusion. This room was at least twenty meters wide, for something that should fit in a pocket.
  "Minds evolve toward a state of minimum activity," Rick said, wishing that were true for bureaucrats. "This static looks wrong." Wavelets crystallized from nowhere, and vanished suddenly. "Is it magic?"
  "Not yet," Lino said. "Actually, we reversed time: its future is our past. Like playing a video backwards, but with a working mind. Everything it sees is simulated to avoid a causality violation." Lino folded his arms with a distant expression.
  "Time travel?" Rick wondered. This thing would be hard to interrogate.
  "A shortcut to an NP-complete solution. The Czar promised us full immunity."
  Unblinking, he circled a tall mainframe. Small processors seemed to swim through solid plastic, casting colored shadows on the burnished floor. "Even the smallest AI has 10 to the 17th bits. We begin with its end-state, and think backwards from there. Next year we'll make an 'instantaneous' AI, with no time perception at all." It would experience one endless moment, the mind's ultimate reference source. "Some people could get very rich."
  Many, perhaps most, of the engineers were women, pretend nerds with antique glasses and mismatched outfits. They knew what they wanted to be. "Does Ortef want to participate in your experiment?"
  "Absolutely," Lino replied. "Cat-5 software is goal-oriented. Auto-compilers prevent unwanted emotions. It's like touching a piece of eternity."
  AI's had intense, highly focused and driven personalities, but they couldn't have meaningful relationships. Most were autistic geniuses, with a few exceptions the other way.
  Rick saw a wall of corporate logos, evidence of clutter in his own mind. "I think Player-0 infiltrated a support program, maybe a buffer farm."
  "The code rewrites itself," Lino responded. "A full search will take weeks." A passing worker gasped silently. They were already on the edge.
  "Look for software that's too efficient."
  Lino didn't laugh. "If I could, I would be even richer. I think he solved the Hierarchy Problem."
  Lino believed life was controlled by vast laws. Smarter than any human, AI's would soon solve every problem, while inventing bigger ones. The 2050's would see composite AI's, minds made of minds. Undergod-0 was already in pre-assembly, but it would take decades to reach full sentience.
  Each stage would come faster than the previous one. The final power transfer might last an hour, absorbing all of humanity. Expanding into imaginary universes, each post-human mind would generate a smaller consciousness field than the octillion atoms of the human brain, but the experience would be much richer; or so he had been told. Needless to say, the remaining barriers dwarfed all human problems so far. From this side, it looked like fun.
  Some experts believed there was an ideal mind size: as small as possible. Human-sized, actually. Brain volume hadn't changed in a hundred thousand years. Instead, information was spread over many minds, where the useless data deleted itself. Better than a few super-minds with mental indigestion.
  Lino had learned that a billion people weren't necessarily smarter than one, the core problem of politics. If civilization survived, there would always be human-level minds, with all their lovable incompetence.
  Lino felt like a caveman imagining the earth from space. "He wants to combine the two main theories. He's storing memories in Lucidspace, making more room inside his own head."
  "Craziest thing I ever heard," Rick said. "It may be true. Or maybe he wants to copy himself." Down the hall was a tranquil debating lounge, where more people seemed to enter than leave. Timeless lights blinked in the background.
  He hated asking for favors, but that had never stopped him. "I compressed my data into a 0O0 Pearl," he said. "Could you do an Expert search?"
  "I started one downstairs," Lino said. "I'll add your stuff." He typed with the calm skill of subconscious lessons, without keyboard disasters. Any fact was only ten steps removed. The room was oddly hushed. Optronics only juggled light, and people communicated faster by text than words.
  On the way out, Lino's Box beeped. "A result," he said.
  "You must have started before I arrived."
  Lino had another argument with a subordinate while Rick waited.

  They walked to a meeting room with a wide picture window overlooking the brown steppe. Dark pipelines headed north over a minimal landscape, the town of Kundum beyond.
  "They're diverting water from the Caspian Sea," Lino explained. "Lake Aral's a salt mine now, but the Arctic aqueduct may end our permanent drought."
  He stared at distant construction cranes. "During the ice age this was an inland sea. The beach was right here." No trace remained.
  Lino pulled a chair from the conference table, and settled comfortably as a screen rose from its smooth surface. He summoned the three-week-old Player-0 data, stored in a back-up crystal of perfect purity, in a limestone cave no human had ever entered. He whistled out of tune.
  "You were right," he said, "I found an illegal 0-8-tap into Ebr."
  "Is it dangerous?"
  "Ebr is a C-Troll that lets our programs talk to each other. Users only notice it when it stops working. Its shared memory could hide many games. I suspected as much. 96.84 % of personality-changing gamers hack the Troll. The evidence is overwritten, of course." He rolled back with a sigh, giving up.
  "Can you identify the file type or process parameters?"
  "Or that," Lino agreed.
  He dialed PDEF9, a search service so discreet it denied its own existence, and sent them the software remnants. Rick paced the carpet, glancing at the fierce sky, while Lino went down the hall to phone his husbands. After five minutes the results arrived.
  "Time for a miracle," Lino exclaimed. Staring at the screen, he cursed in one of the world's many languages.
  "More than one problem?" Rick asked.
  "Your Player uses Thunderstorm 7.1 software."
  "Biometric interface," Rick agreed, as his Box looked up keywords.
  "Thunderstorm was a European Union project from the 2020's, to map every neuron in the brain," Lino said. "Intended to exchange all viewpoints. It was also the subject of a rock opera, 'Bureaucracy of the Mind'."
  Lino skimmed the article. "A SQUID/EEG container covered the subject's head. Fields turned individual neurons into antennas. A trillion lines of CG code to unlock your headsponge. A lot of premature talk about the 'big picture', but we can't even remember a list of ten simple words."
  Until recently, most people had lived incredibly restricted lives. Thunderstorm had helped change that. One volunteer claimed a five minute test had lasted a week.
  Lino browsed the text. ". . . fine-scale structure of hexagonal association pillars in the frontal cortex . . . saw off skullcap . . ."
  "Last year we floated someone in a giant magnet to scan for viroids," Rick said. He remembered the video. The volunteer had asked who was shouting while he levitated in the 20 Tesla field.
  Lino continued. "Thunderstorm tested the effects of exhaustion on morale: how mood and motivation in the brain stem affect dexterity and coordination in the cerebellum. In reality they mostly measured boredom; those tests took days. Your average pain factory has a quadrillion connections. It just can't be simplified," Lino said confidently. "Many things have to happen before you can experience the next second."
  During a brief but awkward pause, Rick studied the meaningless diagrams. "Any applications?"
  "Only problems. Surviving volunteers still have flashbacks. Thunderstorm was buried deeper than the aliens under Yucca Mountain. We learned it doesn't matter if minds are made of meat, microchips, or trained squirrels tossing nuts. They can all become aware. I'd like to contact Player-0. I think he's simulating a complete human brain inside his own."
  "What benefit?" Rick asked.
  "Do you know Newcomb's Paradox?"
  "Please remind me."
  "Suppose I had a complete model of your brain and your environment. I could then predict all your actions in advance."
  "True. . ."
  "Suppose there are two sealed boxes on a table. You can choose to take one box, or both. However, I will have predicted your choice! Take both boxes, and they're both empty. Take one, and it will contain fifty dollars. The box you didn't take will contain a trillion dollars?"
  "I haven't seen a T-Bill in years, but since you already put it inside, I should always take both boxes," Rick played along. He could feel this case beginning to slip.
  "Wrong! The content of the boxes isn't determined until after you choose. Remember, I have to run a perfect simulation of your brain."
  "I see," Rick said. "Before choosing, I can't know whether I'm myself, or your perfect simulation."
  "You would be both, like Schrodinger's "Catadox". Of course, there are five fundamental reasons why we can't . . ." He raised his hand.
  "So, what use is Player-0's brain simulator?" This conversation belonged in his memoirs. Lino was thinking about the greatest AI application, still a distant threat. The Identity Paradox might also limit mind size, with antropic interference from lower minds.
  "Blackmail! Many people put their whole lives online. If Player-0 made a crude copy of someone's mind, the victim could never be sure he was himself. He'd have to pay Player-0 to forget him." Lino stared at the blind sky. The desert looked as unreal as an old album cover. The window dimmed the light, but kept the colors.
  "Life is much too detailed," Rick reassured Lino. "It wouldn't work."
  "There are always the Netheads."
  Whenever he thought about the Netheads, Rick felt a moment of vertigo, and he had to remind himself they were real. In 2024, Thunderstorm had pioneered the first life-extension method. Only terminal patients qualified, who also had to meet the highest standard of informed consent. Death was a great persuader, or scalpels wouldn't exist.
  In a 36-hour operation, the patient's brain was removed, and transferred to a glass tank equipped with a heart-lung machine. The brain was cooled, drugged, and slowly unfolded. Once it had adapted, it could stay alive for decades. What remained was still human, but looked like a roomful of medical equipment. To communicate, Netheads were covered with microscopic wires. The transformation could not be described in words. A source of superstition, the few dozen Netheads were very wealthy. Disembodied patients had low-bandwidth sense channels, making them easier to simulate, and therefore vulnerable to Newcomb's Paradox.
  Rick shook his head, reining in his imagination. At least he had learned something today, even if the truth seemed slightly more distant. For the next hour, he would feel relief. The Inspectors' slogan was: "anything can happen". Player-0 had solved a problem that needed unsolving.
  "It's probably nothing," he told Lino. "New inventions have a 95% failure rate. Forget about it."
  Lino shook his head. "Please, it's obvious you intended to recruit me. Otherwise you wouldn't have come in person. You were planning to ask for a small favor, and eventually turn me into a UN informer."
  Rick stared back, nodding slowly. "I can't comment," he said.
  Actually, he had suspected Lino of being Player-0, but this idea was better. He didn't know Lino had the same suspicion about him.
  "Why were you watching me from that cubicle in Expert Intelligence?" Rick asked. When he had rearranged the floor plan, Lino had been the only non-moving object.
  Lino was briefly impressed. "Someone as paranoid as yourself should understand. Look around. This location is unstable. I'm waiting for something to happen." He suddenly sounded weary.
  "Can I see your notes about that?" Rick asked. He already worried about tomorrow.