The Downloaded, page 12
I’d forgotten that Roscoe and Alan had bonded over their shared love for ancient movies. “Bet you never seen Topper Returns,” he added. “Kinda funny, when you think about what you tried to pull off. Dude in it says, ‘Innocent men don’t hide in iceboxes. And they don’t take dead bodies on boat’—or spaceship—‘rides.’ Well, I’m innocent, all right? I didn’t do it.”
There was really nothing else I could do, was there? “Copy that,” I said. “I guess.” I tried to think of a movie quote of my own that I could toss at him, but all I could come up with was that one that goes something like Do you feel lucky, punk?, which didn’t seem it would help matters, so I just nodded, turned around, and caught up with Jameela, and we headed back to the institute, no closer to solving the mystery.
Interview with Jameela Chowdhury
Yes, of course I was gobsmacked when you showed up. I imagine we all were. You cut quite a figure, you know. At first I assumed your holographic projection was larger than life, but after you said you were from Mars, the pieces started falling into place. We humans are nothing if not adaptable, and the Mars colony was established in 2041. That means you’ve had more than five hundred Earth years—and God only knows how many generations of evolution plus whatever genetic engineering you might have done—to adapt yourself to conditions on the Red Planet.
By the way, I went out and had a look at Mars; it’s easy to find in the wonderfully dark sky here. And it is indeed still red—not green, and not blue. Not that I expected anything different; it would take way more than five hundred years to terraform a world. Have you at least started on that? Good, but it is indeed a slow process.
Although, then again, there’s always Clarke’s Third Law. You remember him? Oh. Well, he was a twentieth-century science-fiction writer, most famous for a movie called 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ask Roscoe Koudoulian about it; I’m sure he can give you all the memorable quotes. Anyway, Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And you lot are a good half-millennium ahead of us, so I thought maybe you’d found a way to speed up the process of making a planet more hospitable to human life. But I see you took the easier route: if you can’t change the planet to suit you, change yourselves to suit the planet.
You know how the space race began? John F. Kennedy—have you heard of him, at least? No? Well, then, I don’t feel as bad for poor Arthur Clarke. Kennedy was the president of the United States. He was assassinated, by the way, and I know who was behind it. But, anyway, in 1961, when proposing that humans go into space, he said—and, by the way, this is a bleeding lovely JFK impersonation I’m going to do, although I guess it’s wasted on you—“Now is the time to take longer strides . . .”
Well, you did that, in spades. Mars’s gravity is only a third of Earth’s, so why not let yourselves grow to be two-and-a-half meters tall? As for your skin, I assume the navy-blue color is related to some form of genetically engineered radiation shielding, correct? Same thing with the black eyeballs? Yes, I thought so. We could have used something like that if we’d ever made it to Proxima Centauri b. Its primary is a red-dwarf flare star, and those bloody things just spew hard radiation.
But, as I was saying, it was startling when you showed up. I think we all appreciate your restraint in not starting off by announcing, “Behold! I am the archangel Gabriel!”
By the by, speaking of that movie 2001, it’s about aliens who left an object on the moon four million years ago, knowing that when humanity developed a technological civilization, they’d go there and dig it up. When the object was finally re-exposed to sunlight, it sent a signal alerting the aliens that humanity was now a space-faring race. Well, except for the gutted office towers, I don’t see any monoliths around here, so how in blazes did you fellows know, to allude to another old movie I’m sure Roscoe likes, that the sleepers here had awakened?
You were spying on us, I bet—just like that Russian, Mikhail Sidorov, I’m sure. You probably set an alarm to remind yourselves of when we were likely to wake up. Maybe you looked first at Mission Control in Darmstadt, or the shuttle launch facility in California, but you had to know that our quantum computer was always going to stay in Waterloo, and so you were bound to look here, too, am I right?
I thought so. So now the big question is, what in the bloody hell do you want? Just what are you up to?
Interview with Dr. Jürgen Haas
The basement cafeteria had become our de facto gathering place, although if we keep eating like pigs, it’ll be more of a de fatso one. Yes, recovering from hibernation takes a lot of calories, but we were spending so much time down there simply because eating gave us something to do.
At first, prisoners and astronauts sat at separate tables, but, more and more, the two groups were mixing. Some of those folk were fascinating. Sure, we astronauts came from all over the world, but there was a sameness to us: privileged backgrounds, advanced degrees, overachievers all. In truth, the ex-cons were much more diverse, and there was no denying that many were victims of circumstance. There but for the grace of the random forces of the universe go I.
Anyway, the table I was at had our newly elected mayor Roscoe Koudoulian plus Caleb, the guy who’d led the storming of the quantum computer; a female prisoner whose name I didn’t catch; and four other members of the Hōkūle‘a’s crew, including our agronomist, Dr. Solomon.
Between forkfuls of baked beans, Roscoe said, “We need a name for our community. We can’t keep calling it the Quantum Cryonics Institute, and, frankly, none of us prisoners like anything with the word ‘institute’ in it.”
“Place already has a name,” said the female prisoner. “Waterloo.”
“Yeah,” replied Roscoe, “but we’re building something new here.”
“Who the hell cares?” said Caleb.
“I care,” replied Roscoe firmly. “We’ve got seven years left. If we’re going to survive even just that long, we need to pick up the pieces and get organized. We need a name we can rally around.”
“Well, then,” I offered, trying to placate the crowd, “how about Newton? It’s both a contraction of ‘New Town’ and it honors Sir Isaac Newton, see, because we’ve all left the quantum realm and are back in a world governed by his physics.”
Caleb looked at me and said, “How are you still single?”
“I’ve got an idea,” said the female prisoner. “What about Phoenix?”
“Isn’t that a place in Nevada?” asked Caleb.
“Arizona, dipshit,” replied the woman. “And, if it still exists at all, it’s probably in ruins like here. But, in myth, the phoenix was a beautiful bird that rose from the ashes of its former self.”
“Hmmm,” said Roscoe. “I like it.”
Caleb blew a raspberry, but there seemed to be agreement among the rest that it was appropriate. Roscoe said we’d put it to a vote later—which we did, and Phoenix was officially adopted.
Just then, Letitia and Jameela joined us. I assumed they’d been outside in the February heat because they stank of sweat. Letitia said, “I just confronted Ja—I mean, Alan Smithee—about whether he was the one who smashed in Mikhail’s skull. He claims he’s innocent.”
“Hey, I’m innocent of my crime, too,” said Caleb.
“Me, too,” added the female prisoner.
“Aren’t we all?” said Roscoe with a smile.
“Copy that,” said Letitia, “but if he really didn’t do it, then I don’t have a clue who did.”
“What the fuck difference does it make?” asked Caleb.
I was about to answer when Roscoe, doing an impression of someone with a gravelly voice and a lisp, launched into what must have been an old-movie quote: “‘When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something. It makes no difference what you thought of him. He was your partner, and you’re supposed to do something about it. And it happens we’re in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it’s . . . it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.’”
Letitia nodded. “Exactly. So, if not Alan Smithee, then who in the hell did do it?”
Chapter 8
Interview with Roscoe Koudoulian
Yeah, sure, I was surprised to hear an asteroid was going to smash into Earth. But I wasn’t that choked up by it. My daughter Annabelle—the only person who had mattered to me—has been dead for centuries. And this world we’ve finally been let out into? Not much, is it?
Still . . .
Still, it’ll all be gone soon, won’t it? Not just what’s left of Waterloo and any other twenty-first-century cities, but the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, every monument, every museum. Rick was wrong; we won’t always have Paris.
And it wasn’t just what we petty humans had created that was going to be obliterated, not just whatever art and architecture that might still exist, but all that natural beauty would be destroyed, too—whatever of it that had survived global warming. No more rivers and lakes, no more trees and flowers, no more wild animals, no fish in the seas—hell, no seas; Jameela says they’re going to boil away. It’s . . . it’s a lot, isn’t it? A lot to take in.
But the stars? They will abide, I suppose, just with no one here to look at them, to appreciate their beauty, to make up pictures that go with their patterns, to feel—as one of the poets I read in prison called it—the wide awe and wisdom of the night.
I guess that’s why when Valentina asked me if I wanted to go outside and look at the stars with her, I quickly agreed.
Ah. You’ve raised—well, you don’t have any eyebrows, but I see the left side of your blue forehead lifting. No, no, it wasn’t like that, honest. It’s just that she’s an astronaut, and I’d never had an expert show me the sky. The moon wasn’t up yet—I say “yet” like I had any idea whether it was going to be visible that night or not—and, away from the institute’s lights, the sky was the darkest I’d ever seen. “The Milky Way,” I said, sweeping my arm from horizon to horizon, trying to impress her that I knew something about the night sky.
But she wasn’t fooled. “Do you know what it is?” she asked.
I shook my head; she couldn’t see that in the dark, but, as my mother used to say, maybe she could hear the rattling.
“Our own galaxy. At this time of year, we’re looking outward toward the rim. The whole shebang—our entire galaxy—consists of 200 billion stars.”
I looked at the river of light, thinking about that. You know, it’s a shame that, before civilization fell, we couldn’t turn off all the lights in our cities, maybe once a year for an hour, so everyone could clearly see the Milky Way like that.
Really? You guys do that every night? Huh. Aren’t you afraid of looting when the lights are off? It would have been a free-for-all here on Earth if we’d ever done that.
Precautions? Like what?
Oh. I’m not sure I could live with that. Even when I was in simulated prison, I wasn’t being watched and recorded all the time. Anyway, Valentina had an LED flashlight she’d gotten from one of the institute’s robots. She’d covered the lens with a bit of red cellophane she’d found somewhere so its light wouldn’t wreck our night vision. “Look!” she said. “You can see the Andromeda galaxy!”
“Where?” I asked.
“You see the W of Cassiopeia? Look to the left of it until you find a little smudge of white.”
I tried, but there were so many stars, picking out any pattern was hard. “I’m not finding it.”
“Here,” she said, and she took my hand in hers—and, yes, her voice had been male all this time, but it still startled me to feel a man’s hand touching mine. She maneuvered my arm until I was pointing at the right spot, and I saw it.
“That light left there two and a half million years ago,” Valentina said, “before the birth of genus Homo. It’s the farthest object we can see with the naked eye and the only thing in the northern sky that isn’t part of our own galaxy.”
She let go of my hand and I was, to tell the truth, simultaneously relieved and disappointed. “You were going to, um, Proxima Centauri, was it? Where’s that?”
“Well, Proxima is never visible without a telescope, but you can’t ever see it from Canada, anyway; it’s in a southern constellation.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to make your journey.”
“Thanks.” She sounded wistful, but I don’t think it was because her life, along with those of the rest of us stuck on this ball of rock, will likely be cut short by Brimstone. She’d been on another kind of journey, you know? And unless they could find a way to replace our long-expired anesthetics, it was a journey that had hit a significant bump in the road.
I stared at the Milky Way arching from north to south. “It looks unreal.”
To my surprise, Valentina laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“You sound like Jameela.”
“Who?”
“Jameela Chowdhury, our astrophysicist. She thinks it’s possible that none of this is real—that even before we ever uploaded we were already in a computer simulation.”
Although being in virtual prison sure as hell felt real enough at the time, I could tell in a million little ways that this was more real. “Why would she think that?”
“Oh, lots of people thought we were living in a simulation before civilization fell. The argument goes like this: eventually, humanity will have enough computing power to simulate artificial worlds that are indistinguishable from the real one. And, in that future, historians will want to simulate the past, right? So they can see what things might have been like if, for instance, President Hayakawa had never been assassinated. So, if eventually there are, say, a million simulations of this year which is, um, Twenty-Five . . .”
“Twenty-Five Forty-Eight,” I said.
“Right. If there are a million perfect simulations of 2548, and only one real 2548, then the chances are a million to one that we’re in one of the simulations.”
I thought about that but then shook my head. “Nobody cares about the past. You were born—when?”
“Twenty Twenty-Seven.”
“Have you ever seen a silent film all the way through?”
“No.”
“A black-and-white one?”
“Ummm, a couple, I suppose.”
“Thousands were made. But almost no one watches them anymore. I mean, not that anyone can watch films now, but before the fall, no one cared. And that’s our recent history. Sure, some people still read twentieth-century books, too—but nineteenth? Eighteenth? A few famous titles, maybe, but, in general, no. The past just isn’t fascinating enough for people to want to simulate any particular part of it millions of times.”
I couldn’t see Valentina, but she sounded impressed. “That’s an excellent point. Jameela is a maverick as far as physicists go. If you ask me, she wanted to take off for Proxima Centauri because everyone in her professional community disagreed with her on so many things. Most physicists would say there are two other problems with the idea that people in the future will want to simulate their ancestors over and over again.”
We were slowly wandering, the red circle from her flashlight leading our way. I was enjoying the beautiful sky, the warm breeze, and the company. She went on. “First, there’s chaos theory. You know about that?”
“Yeah. We studied it when I was doing my MBA. It’s why no one can predict the stock market over the long term. Very small, seemingly irrelevant factors quickly blossom into huge differences.”
“Right. And no matter how precisely you thought you’d modeled the past, you’d be wrong in some small detail, and your simulation would rapidly diverge from reality to the point of being useless for any sort of historical study.”
I nodded, although she couldn’t see it. “Like when we were conceived,” I said. “If our parents had had sex a second later, a different sperm would have fertilized the egg, and you could have been born a . . . um . . ..”
I was afraid I was about to give offense, but her voice still sounded warm. “Could have been born a girl instead of a boy, or, even if a boy, a very different boy. That’s right. And there’s another thing. Like I said, Jameela is a contrarian, but most physicists have come to believe we live in a block universe.”
“A what?”
“Think of it this way: if you took all the frames of a film—umm, what’s your favorite?”
“Ever? Casablanca.”
She laughed. “At least I’ve heard of that one. Okay, think of all of time being represented by that movie. And think of the single frame that happens to be illuminated by the projector as now, right? Well, you can roll the film backward or forward so that the moment that is now changes, but you can’t change the actual film, get it? Everything before now is immutably fixed—rewinding the film and playing it again, Sam, doesn’t change it at all—and everything after now is just as fixed. Even if you hadn’t seen the ending yet, the ending was already there, waiting to be illuminated.”
“Then what happens to free will?”
“Most physicists say there’s no such thing. We have an illusion of choice but no actual choice. The film of this universe is—what’s the saying? ‘In the can.’ We just haven’t seen how it turns out yet.”
I thought about that. A quarter century ago, as I figure it, and almost five centuries ago, as the world counts it, I did something stupid, something evil. But . . . well, it was comforting, sort of, to think that I couldn’t have done anything else, that that plot point was inevitable in the story of my life.
Valentina went on: “So, see, if the idea that we do live in a block universe becomes the prevailing paradigm outside of the physics community by whatever far-future time humanity has the technology to perfectly simulate whole worlds, the notion of counterfactual or alternate histories goes out the window. Simulating different versions of the past would be pointless because the past couldn’t have been any different.”
