All That We See or Seem, page 6
“What are you talking about? What’s your name?”
“My name isn’t relevant. Just find what I want. I know she has it.”
“Without your name, how am I supposed to look?”
“Everyone calls me the Prince, and you can too. But that won’t help you. How about this? If you don’t know how to find what I’m looking for, just send me everything she has. Here is a server address you can use.”
“I can’t possibly send you everything Elli has. There’s tons of personal data, not to mention our life together—”
“Send me what I want or send me everything. I’ll be generous and give you until the end of Wednesday.”
*
They played the call recording over and over, parsing every sentence, scrutinizing every detail. Piers debated with himself, changing his mind every five minutes.
“What could he possibly mean by ‘she has me’?”
“Could it be that Elli learned some secret of his during a vivid dreaming session?” Based on what Julia knew about the oneirofex’s art, this seemed the most plausible guess. “You said it could be very intimate.”
Piers shook his head. “That’s impossible. If you understood how dreaming worked, you would know that.”
“Then it has to be some information, some piece of . . . data. About him.” Julia shook her head in frustration. She was just restating the obvious.
“I don’t know what to do,” Piers said finally, burying his face in his hands.
Julia recoiled at the idea of giving up Elli’s data, but she saw the trap they were in. It came down to this unalterable fact: so long as there was a chance that “the Prince”—Julia wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, but she couldn’t—really had Elli, they had to do as the man asked.
“There’s really no way to know?” Piers pleaded.
“There isn’t,” Julia said. “I’m sorry. I wish, I really, really wish, I could tell you for sure that the video was faked. But I can’t. I just don’t know.”
“Elli does like codes,” Piers muttered. “She’s always putting them in her performances for the fans. So maybe he really does have her—that’s why he doesn’t want her to talk to me.”
Julia said nothing.
“And if she’s okay, she would have contacted me by now, right? She wouldn’t leave me in this state . . . while the police are watching me and this Prince guy is breathing down my neck.”
Julia said nothing. From the outside, it was impossible to tell what was going on inside a marriage.
“And I’ve tried to ask Elli’s AI whether it knows what the Prince is asking for. It has no idea what I’m talking about.”
Julia said nothing. The fact that Elli’s AI claimed to know nothing about this could mean that Elli was hiding something even from her AI, that Piers really didn’t have the level of access to her AI he thought he did, or that this Prince character was full of crap. Again, no way to know.
“I don’t see how we have any choice. We have to do as he asks. We have to . . . upload everything that Elli has. Can you help me?”
SEVEN
By the time Julia helped Piers get the upload going, it was past ten at night.
Most people underestimated how much data they generated over a lifetime. Every generation took more pictures, videos, flipclips, immersion scenes, cephaloscripts . . . than the last one; wrote more and longer books, memos, codes, emails, blogs, sparksnarks, longshouts, promptmacros; generated more click-through user agreements, shrink-wrap licenses, bills, payment records, receipts, implied contribution contracts; and this didn’t even account for all the semi-original or entirely unoriginal “content” AI generated on behalf of everyone, often with little to no supervision.
And for someone like Elli, who worked in a medium that relied on the crowd and their data, everything above was multiplied tenfold.
For someone like Julia, who viewed the creation and proliferation of data about herself almost like a sin, the terabytes upon terabytes on Elli Krantz’s drives were shocking.
Julia didn’t like the idea of uploading everything about Elli to the Prince. What if getting that data was the scam? Once these people had Elli’s personal data, the potential for any number of follow-up acts of malfeasance was unbounded. Julia ought to know; she had been through data-disclosure hell herself.
Yet, so long as it was possible that the Prince had Elli, what could Piers do?
So she did the next best thing. She sorted the files on Elli’s drives by type. The upload would begin with the most innocuous stuff she could imagine: recordings of public performances, publicity material, archived interviews. . . . She pushed the sensitive data to later, with the neuromesh of Elli’s personal AI, essentially a second self trained on everything Elli had ever done, the very last thing to be uploaded. (The neuromesh was encrypted, but Julia knew that didn’t mean much. Thanks to arrogant, clueless bureaucrats in Brussels, encryption on cloud-based commercial personal AI was required to contain a back door for law enforcement—which meant anyone could crack it given enough resources.)
She hoped there would be enough time between now and Wednesday night for her to either figure out if they had Elli or find the “me” that the Prince wanted.
“You’re not going to just sit there all night and watch the upload progress bar, are you?” she asked.
Piers turned his bleary eyes from the monitor to her. Apparently, he had been intending to do exactly that.
“I suggest you use your time more productively,” Julia coaxed. “Come, help me so I can see what it was like to dream with Elli.”
*
Together, Piers and Julia removed the sensor-festooned mannequin from the recliner. Julia sat down in its place, pulled on the neural-sensing VR headset, and tightened the straps.
She darkened the lenses and tested the neural sensing, concentrating on the white arrows in her field of view until she could move them fluidly by thinking about them. Pretty intuitive—the headset essentially worked like a fancier version of the esports headsets that competitive gamers used, which she was familiar with; keyboard-and-mouse was no match against direct neural sensing regarding precision, reaction time, or actions-per-minute.
Satisfied, she put the lenses back in pass-through mode to talk to Piers, who was waiting by the dream deck.
“You just have to press enter once I give you the signal,” she said. “Talos and Elli’s egolet will do everything from then on.”
“All right,” Piers said.
She could sense his unease. “What’s wrong?”
“This is weird for me,” Piers admitted.
“What? Me wearing her headset?”
“No.” Piers hesitated. “It’s just the idea that Elli will now be dreaming with you, one-on-one—sort of. I’ve never done anything like this with her.”
“Never?”
“I never asked. It’s her art, you know? It would be like asking your wife, a rock star, to put on a concert just for you. It feels wrong.”
“Maybe she can’t do this with just one person,” Julia said. “She practiced by herself, never with another person. You said vivid dreaming is about the collective experience; perhaps the dream guide needs a crowd to practice her art.”
“But what if she doesn’t? Now I wish I had asked.”
As bad as she was with people, Julia could tell that Piers needed reassurance. “When I go in, it won’t really be her, you know.”
*
Even with the state-of-the-art processors in Elli’s studio, even with Julia, Piers, Talos, and Elli’s AI all working together, it had taken more than three hours to train the egolet. Instead of the real Elli, this AI model of her would guide Julia’s first vivid dream.
Piers hadn’t believed it would work at all. Elli had told him that vivid dreaming only worked because of the presence of the oneirofex, the human spark.
But Julia knew there was more nuance to that. As Piers had told her (and she had confirmed it with research), an oneirofex relied on AI to process the vast amounts of data generated by the audience. Julia surmised that, over time, the AI had to have learned the oneirofex’s particular propensities for responding to trends in the audience, her unique tendencies in prompting the audience, her go-to tricks in nudging and driving the audience to a shared emotional curve—in a word, Elli’s AI had to have learned something of her style.
It was no different from how photographers’ AIs, over time, learned to apply filters and make adjustments that their humans would have made, or how experienced DJs would sometimes let their AIs run most or even all of a show on autopilot. Even Julia herself would sometimes let Talos handle a routine neuromesh hack on its own, as the AI had learned to “think” like her in specific ways. Some aspects—maybe even most aspects—of what an artist did consisted of skills that could be embedded in a neuromesh model.
Neuromeshes modeled on one specific aspect of a person, such as a skill or expertise, were dubbed “egolets.” In contrast to early crude “generative AI” models, which only ingested finished paintings, novels, films, and the like, and whose productions were caricatures of the masters they imitated, egolets of artists were trained on processes, not merely a few finished products.
An artist’s skill cannot be extracted solely from the finished picture, novel, film, composition, but requires an understanding of all the covered-up brushstrokes, all the deleted scenes and murdered darlings, all the raw footage before editing. An artist is, above all, someone who knows how to say no to many things and yes to only a few things. Their style is how they decide which is which. A proper egolet can only be made from an artist’s personal AI, which has access to everything.
These days, artists’ licensing of their personal styles, though still debated, was growing.
Egolets of actors—performance capture data animated by the actors’ personal AIs—were in high demand, and one actor, notorious for being difficult to work with, was now rumored to receive more licensing fees for his egolet—which had been stripped of the more recalcitrant aspects of his ego by his manager—than for on-set performances.
A bestselling author, known for her socially progressive fiction, had been caught pumping out books under a different pen name intended for “real Americans” with a modified version of her egolet so she could double her sales (when the scandal broke, she tried to blame it on “hackers”). Ghostwriters for celebrities regularly licensed ghostwriting egolets to smaller clients who wanted their own vanity memoirs but couldn’t afford the fees for the real deal.
A critically acclaimed painter, hungry for cash as well as controversy, licensed an egolet of himself to craft bespoke portraits of anyone willing to pay ten dollars. The trollish stunt turned him into a pariah for a while, but amidst all the denunciations of “selling out,” he claimed to have gotten more than a million paying customers. And one of the most lucrative revenue streams in the porn industry involved performers licensing their egolets for sex dolls.
Whether you viewed it as a way for artists to expand their presence—a natural extension of the way Rodin and da Vinci used apprentices to execute more work than they could do personally—or as the ultimate cheapening and devaluation of human craft, egolets were already a big part of the modern business of art.
And so Julia had come up with the idea of crafting an egolet of Elli’s aspect as an oneirofex so that she could experience a vivid dream. If the dreaming experience helped her know Elli better, she would perhaps be better able to help Piers and Elli.
Crafting an egolet was as much art as science, and professional egolet-sculptors were highly paid artists in their own right. Though not a professional, Julia managed a passable job by drawing on her extensive experience with neuromeshes. The task of creating an egolet of Elli’s oneirofex self was also considerably eased by the vast number of recordings of her practice sessions. Not only did she record detailed promptscripts of herself performing, but she also recorded high-resolution biofeedback data, cephaloscripts of herself reacting to the prompts, and adjustments to the prompts based on the feedback. This kind of data—an artist improving her craft, developing her voice, inventing her style—was critical for training a performance egolet.
Dreaming with Elli’s egolet wouldn’t be the same as dreaming with the real Elli, Julia knew. For one thing, she had so little time that the egolet was necessarily crude, almost like a caricature of Elli as a dream guide. For another, the egolet’s range of responses would be limited—the more Julia deviated from the training set used to construct the egolet, the more nonsensical it would become.
Elli was right that an egolet couldn’t replace her—even the best egolets couldn’t do that to their artists. This was something that artists (and Julia, like the best technologists, was an artist) understood intuitively. To be an artist required skill, which could be learned, more or less, by a neuromesh, but it also required originality, empathy, a soul. So far, no one had figured out how to put those things into a neuromesh.
But that didn’t mean nothing useful could be gained from trying to dream with a machine’s memory of Elli.
*
“I didn’t include anything personal in the training data,” Julia went on. “There’s nothing about you, nothing about her dreams, nothing about this life you’ve built together.”
“It’s just that I’ve only now realized that she never offered to dream with me, just the two of us,” Piers said. “Why not? She never told me she couldn’t dream with just one person.”
Julia didn’t know what to say. The way his face strained not to show the pain of suspected betrayal . . . She looked away.
“Maybe I don’t know her as well as I thought. What if the Prince is telling the truth, that Elli did take . . . something from him, something very personal? Maybe she’s been living another life I know nothing about.”
“I . . .” Julia couldn’t continue. Her presence felt intrusive. More than ever, she thought: I really am bad with people.
“I’m sorry,” Piers said, struggling to rein in his emotions. “I’m being selfish. Here you are, trying to help me by doing something you’ve never done before—that no one has done before. And I’m letting my insecurities get in the way. Sorry.”
“You’ve had a rough time,” Julia said. It came out awkward, but it was sincere.
Piers laughed. “Yeah. I wouldn’t call this weekend one of my best. You’ve had a rough day yourself, being forced out of your home by strangers. Are you nervous about your first vivid dream?”
Now that he asked, she was anxious. Vivid dreaming required the dreamer to open herself to the guide, to essentially shut off the privacy safeguards on her personal AI so that the guide could extract images and memories and construct prompts based on the dreamer’s life. Giving Elli’s egolet such access to herself made her feel incredibly vulnerable. She hadn’t opened herself up like that to anyone since Sahima. . . .
Piers had assured her that the dream deck was designed to erase all user cephaloscripts after a dream; the industry had made user privacy a keystone to entice more users. Elli’s equipment and AI would retain nothing about Julia. This was why it would have been impossible for Elli to steal an audience member’s secret.
But the reassurance meant little—Julia was all too aware of how easily people gave up their privacy for the most ridiculous reasons, and how often the tech industry simply lied to their users. Talos, however, had confirmed for her that what Piers said was true. And she had triple-checked to be sure that neither the egolet nor any of the data it would be generating would be uploaded to the Prince—that would be a disaster indeed. She resolved to find out more about the dream deck’s data security later, but for now, the desire to know what it was like to vivid dream overrode her paranoia.
“I’ll be fine,” she said to Piers. As much to reassure him as herself. “Go ahead.”
“Sweet dreams,” he said, tapping the enter key on the console.
EIGHT
Instantly, the lenses turned black, blocking out Piers, the console, the rest of the room.
When the lights came up again, Julia found herself inside a theater.
Not like the theater in the video Piers had shown her earlier. This one was much smaller and followed the traditional floor plan: a stage framed by a proscenium arch, facing gently curving rows of seats. She was in the front row, an audience of one. With a start, Julia realized this was the auditorium from her middle school in Methven, Massachusetts.
Elli stood onstage. Though she was the same height as Julia, the stage made Julia loom above her, a radiant figure of grace.
“We are all lead actors in our own plays,” Elli said. Her voice was musical and warm, with a husky texture that drew the listener in. “I want you to find the story you want to tell.”
She raised an arm and waved to somewhere above the lights. Music began to play: Tibetan singing bowls and Andean zampoñas.
Though fitting given the setting, the theatricality of the performance grated on Julia. Belatedly, she realized that she had never picked a dream but allowed the egolet to choose a dream for her. She didn’t feel spiritual. She didn’t feel she needed to “tell” some story. What was she doing here? She was about to reach up and lift off the headset when Elli turned her gaze on her.
“You’re free to go,” she said, her voice rising and falling as though she were singing. “But if you’ve never done it before, don’t you at least owe yourself an honest try?” The way she looked into Julia’s eyes, intense but also inviting, sent a tingle down her spine.
Julia was no stranger to conversing with egolets. But there was something about this digital simulacrum of Elli that unsettled her, despite how compelling it was. She couldn’t pin down what felt off. Was it because she was unused to Elli’s fancy renderer’s high resolution and frame rate? Or was vivid dreaming meant to make you feel out of place?
In any event, based on the egolet, she could only marvel at how charismatic the real Elli must have been.
On impulse, she asked, “Somebody calling himself ‘the Prince’ says you took ‘him’ and now he wants it back. What does he mean? What are you hiding?”
