The Downloaded, page 3
And then, after what seemed like an eternity, the folding panels of the door passed the top of his head, and he tumbled backward and fell onto the driveway . . . just as a woman out walking a poodle passed by on the street. I stood there dumbfounded while she brought out her phone. She must have called 911, because soon enough I heard screaming sirens approaching.
Interview with Captain Letitia Garvey
So, yes, ColdBoot and its competitors could freeze a body, but they couldn’t preserve a consciousness. All those decades my Grandpa spent just lying there, he couldn’t even be dreaming; everything he had once been was gone for good.
But that didn’t stop me from dreaming about him, and when I was in my silo, he was often there with me. Sure, it was a simulacrum, and maybe it really didn’t resemble the actual man. Oh, physically, it looked like him; I’d seen enough photos and home movies to get those details right. And I suppose he must have had flaws and foibles like the rest of us, but in my reality he was perfect. The kind of person I always wanted to be: strong, resourceful, fearless. In my silo, we went adventuring together. I got to relive his peacekeeping experiences, dodging missiles and land mines. And I got to be in Cape Town with him when he went there in 1990 to march with Mandela. In real life, cancer was already slowing Grandpa down by then, and he apparently barely survived a mob attack by a bunch of whites, but in my version I was there with them—him, Mandela, all the others—kicking ass and taking names.
Of course, my grandpa wasn’t the only human being who wanted to cheat death. They came along too late for him, but other competing paths toward immortality started to bear fruit, and eventually the notion of scanning and uploading consciousness into a computer went from science fiction—that is, from a rational, reasonable extrapolation of what we actually know—to science fact. Straight digital scanning of a mind accomplished nothing, but using quantum entanglement to produce an exact duplicate inside a quantum computer did the trick.
Except that most of the first quantum copies produced went insane. Why? Because there was nothing for them to see or do inside the quantum computer. They existed but there was no sensory input, no world in which they lived, no space in which they could move.
The first solution tried was slowing the clock speed of the quantum computer to zero; the idea was to store a snapshot of the mind without it experiencing any passage of time. But the same thing happened as with frozen brains: they never rebooted any self-awareness. It turned out that you have to keep consciousness running—and that meant you had to keep it sane, and that meant building a virtual-reality environment inside the quantum computer where it could feel and think and interact.
Store the body at sub-zero temperatures; store the mind in a quantum computer—and reunite them at some point in the future. It was a perfect solution not just for those seeking to beat death, like my grandpa, but also for astronauts like Jürgen and me planning to go on a centuries-long interstellar voyage.
Except, damn it all, something went horribly, horribly wrong.
Chapter 2
Interview with Roscoe Koudoulian
Damn thing about self-driving cars: of course, the laws vary from state-to-state, but back then in Massachusetts, the cops could send a signal from headquarters that prevented all automobiles in a given area from turning on. They did that as soon as the woman walking by reported Mitch Aldershot’s corpse tumbling backward out of his garage as the door rose up revealing me standing there holding the bloody garden shears I’d killed him with.
So, my getaway car was as dead as Mitch Aldershot. Sure I made a run for it, but Boston’s finest had no trouble tracking me on street cams, and I was tasered and arrested about three blocks from the scene of the crime.
My eventual trial was pretty open-and-shut on the actual murder rap—that woman had made a video on her phone of the events immediately following Aldershot’s death. The big question the jury deliberated about was whether I had premeditated killing him. Weighing against that notion was the fact that I’d shown up at his place with no weapon. But supporting it was the reality that I’d tracked him down, traveled to Boston, and deliberately confronted him with the intent at the very least of assaulting him. That the murder weapon was simply an object at hand—the garden shears—was immaterial asserted the asshole district attorney.
In the end, the jury sided with the state. I was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to fifty years with no possibility of parole for thirty-five.
Thirty-five years. My daughter had turned eight during my trial. That meant she’d be forty-three by the time I got out, probably with children of her own—my grandchildren.
My lawyer, Padma Chopra, said she’d appeal, but, despite what you hear, you don’t automatically get another kick at the can. Unless your counsel shows that the judge screwed up somehow, maybe overruling an objection they should have sustained or incorrectly advising the jury on the law, you don’t get an appeal—and I didn’t.
I’d expected to be hauled off to the state pen, but then something odd happened. Instead, Stella Rosen, the head of the Massachusetts Department of Correction, had me and Padma summoned to her office. “Fifty years of hard time,” Rosen said as I sat in a chair opposite her clutter-free oak desk.
“Or thirty-five,” I countered, “if I get parole.”
She leaned back in her swivel chair and interlaced her fingers behind her short graying hair. “True, true. And, for the sake of argument, let’s assume you would.”
“Bet your ass,” I said.
“You’ve heard about those astronauts who are going to head off to Proxima Centauri?” asked Rosen, a non sequitur—a term I’d learned from Star Trek—if ever I’d heard one.
“Um, sure.”
“They’re going to freeze their bodies, putting them into hibernation for the five-hundred-year voyage. And they’ll upload their consciousnesses into a quantum computer that’ll stay here on Earth, right?”
“I guess.”
“Well,” continued the director, “we’re part of an international pilot project along similar lines, although no one is going to go anywhere in our case. Instead of putting prisoners in a penitentiary, we’re giving them the chance to be frozen with their consciousnesses uploaded until their sentences are over. I’m offering you and Ms. Chopra that option.”
I’m sure I looked dumbfounded. “Why on Earth would I agree to a bullshit scheme like that?”
“Well, first, the virtual-reality accommodations are much nicer than an actual prison cell. Also, you’re in your own silo, as they call them: your own isolated environment. Everybody you interact with will be a simulation rather than a real human being. No need to worry about bullying, prison rape, or anything like that.”
“Look at me,” I said. “Do I look like I have to worry about bullies?”
“You did at one time, no? That’s what brought you here. And you wouldn’t believe how many people go to prison thinking they’ll be the alpha and come out broken. Yes, you’re a murderer, but you’re not a career criminal. You have no idea how tough these fuckers can be.”
“No sale,” I said.
“Wait, let me finish. First, if you agree to participate, your sentence will be reduced to twenty years—that’s better than getting parole in your case; we want the entire pilot cohort to go in to and come out of their individual virtual prisons simultaneously, so we can study them as a group.
“But the real plus is this: we run the quantum computer holding your consciousness at twenty-four times normal speed. Yes, you’ll feel twenty years go by—lots of time to reflect on what you did, and we’ll make sure you do that—but only ten months will pass here in the outside world.”
“Ten months,” I repeated softly.
“That’s right—and your frozen body won’t have aged a day during that time. You won’t come out of prison an old man but still a vigorous guy in his thirties.”
I thought about my daughter Annabelle. I could serve my sentence and still be out before she turned ten. Instead of her having to listen to decades of people telling her what a monster her father was without me around to explain, I’d be there with her as she grew up. Her first days in Scouts, her first days in middle school, her first date . . . and the boy or girl better get her home on time!
Padma spoke, surprising me with an unexpected area of expertise: “I didn’t think you could speed up simulated reality that much—not and still have high-resolution rendering.”
“Ah, yes,” said Rosen. “You’re right: computers simulating immersive reality usually operate at slower-than-normal clock speeds, not faster ones. But that’s because a user can suddenly decide to change locale to, say, a forest in Madagascar, and all of that has to be rendered from scratch, which takes a lot of time and processing resources. But our project deals with people who have, by definition, been deprived of their freedom of movement. We only have to simulate an unchanging prison cell and a couple of other places, and we’ve already rendered those in high definition. Speeding up the system clock works just fine for our limited purposes.”
“Screw all that,” I said. “I don’t get why you’d do this. What’s in it for the state?”
Rosen leaned forward. “Simple economics. This costs a tiny fraction of what it does to imprison someone for decades. No food needed, no guards—and my criminologists believe we’re much more likely to get a rehabilitated ex-convict out of the process.”
“What are the risks?” asked Padma.
“A specialist will take you and your client through a detailed informed-consent process. And, yes, there’s always the possibility that something will go wrong. That said, the chance of dying undergoing this procedure is less than a quarter of that of dying a violent death during a thirty-five-year prison term—and there’s zero chance of you dying of old age after being frozen for only ten months.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” I said.
The woman smiled, but it was a mirthless grimace. “Of course. We can have you moved into Cedar Junction until you make up your mind.”
And those were my two choices: go straight into a state penitentiary or give this crazy plan a try. There was no third scenario in which I got to go home, got to collect one more hug from Annabelle, got to sleep one more night in my own bed.
I looked at Padma, who lifted her hands in an “it’s up to you” way, then I turned back to Rosen. “All right,” I said. “Count me in.”
Interview with Dr. Jürgen Haas
Where were we? Oh, yeah. You’d asked me when I first realized that things had gone to ratshit. Well, it’s like I said: there we were, standing on the shore of the Niagara River, me glistening from my bravura display of body surfing and Letitia glaring at me.
She told me to put on more clothes—she’s no fun—and so I imagined myself wearing what had been typical garb for me before uploading: tennis shoes, tan denim jeans, and an orange floral-print Hawaiian shirt.
And that was the first sign something was amiss, see? This hard-nosed woman in front of me was, somehow, the real Letitia, not the avatar of her I’d dreamed up. “How the hell did you get in here?” I demanded.
“You mean in your private silo? Despite what you seem to think, Jürgen, I’m more than just a pretty face. I’m captain of the mission, remember? I have access privileges that others don’t. Damn good thing, too, because something has gone very wrong.”
“What?”
“You know what day it is?”
I figured I had a one-in-seven shot. “Tuesday.”
“No, no. I mean the date—the objective date in the outside world.”
“Well, um, I guess it’s 2540 . . . something . . . by now, right?”
She shook her head, stunned that I hadn’t been paying attention to the calendar. “It’s February fourteenth, 2548.”
“Oooh! And you wanted to see me for Valentine’s Day!”
A frown. “No, numbnuts. That’s the day, according to the mission timer, on which I’m supposed to check the external cameras as we begin our final approach to Proxima Centauri b. Just to make sure it’s safe to send our landing craft down, right?”
“Right. And?”
“And you know what the cameras showed, big and bright as your fat ass?”
I shook my head.
She pointed at an upward angle. “That.”
I turned and looked, and there it was, lovely and full. “A moon?” I said.
“Not just a moon,” she replied. “The moon. Our moon. Luna.”
“How the hell did our moon get to Proxima Centauri?”
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “It didn’t. We never went there. Funny thing: the moon is way easier to recognize than Earth; all those clouds obscure Earth’s geography. When I first saw Earth, I assumed I was looking at Proxima b—a beautiful, perfect home for us—but there’s no mistaking our moon. It wasn’t full, like your fake one here; I watched it for an hour, and you could see it visibly getting more gibbous. The Seas of Tranquility and Serenity were obvious, not to mention Tycho and its rays. There’s no question: our starship is still in orbit around Earth.”
“That can’t be right,” I said.
“It is! It is. We’re not almost to another star; we haven’t even left on our journey yet. We’ve spent five centuries going nowhere.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“But that’s not the worst of it. I mean, if that’s all that had gone wrong, I could just fire up the Hōkūle‘a’s engines and send us on our way. Yeah, it’d be four more subjective years until we reached Proxima Centauri, but so what? It’s not like our bodies are aging.”
That sounded fine to me; I’d been having a blast. “Okay.”
“No, it’s not okay. Because I also tied into the shipboard cameras and checked the hibernation bay. And guess what? It’s empty. Our cryo-coffins were never loaded on board.”
“So where are they? Where are our bodies?”
“Who in the hell knows? But there’s one way to find out. If I don’t override anything, the mission profile calls for you and me to be reintegrated—bodies revived and minds downloaded back into them—in about two hours.”
As the Hōkūle‘a’s physician, I was supposed to revive along with the captain, to help in case anything went wrong with the automated reanimation of the others. “Have you tried contacting Mission Control?” I asked.
“Of course. No answer. In fact, I can’t pick up any radio signals.”
“So the Hōkūle‘a’s communications system has failed,” I said, preferring to suggest that possibility rather than any of the darker ones roiling my thoughts.
“Apparently,” said Letitia. “So, are you game? Like I said, I can prevent you from downloading, but there should be a doctor along.”
I’m sure I frowned. A lot could happen in five centuries. There was no guarantee if we downloaded into a bad situation that the equipment still existed to upload our consciousnesses again. And, well, I loved my private silo; I’d gotten quite used to that life. I suppose that’s why I hadn’t been keeping track of the date; I wasn’t looking forward to our arrival. Yeah, I’d fought tooth-and-nail to be selected for the Proxima Centauri mission—chief medical officer on the U.N.S.S. Hōkūle‘a, Earth’s first starship!—but that was years ago.
And the twenty-four of us in the crew were all of the same type. We didn’t have family ties in the real world; that’s one reason we’d been willing to head off to Proxima Centauri to establish a colony there. We’d never intended to set foot on Earth again. And, now, if we did, five hundred years after we’d been frozen, we’d probably be freaks—like those pathetic bastards who’d signed up with ColdBoot would be if they were ever revived.
As I stood there looking at Letitia, I was getting tired of the roar of the Niagara River and the darkness, so, with a snap of my simulated fingers, I switched us to a quiet forest in autumn, a carpet of red, orange, and yellow maple leaves beneath my feet. It was just one of the countless places both real and imagined that I could conjure up at will—while I was still in here. But if I downloaded all my superpowers would disappear.
“You know what?” I said. “I think I’ll pass.” Letitia’s mouth dropped open, and I held up a hand. “Look,” I continued, “no matter where we are, we’re in no danger. If something was going to go wrong with the hibernation equipment or the quantum computer, it would have happened long ago. And I assume the rest of our crew are all as happy as I was until a few minutes ago. Given that the Proxima mission was aborted for some reason, what’s the point of calling any of us back from our individual versions of heaven?”
“Well, I’m going to download,” Letitia said firmly. “Heaven is all well and good—mine had lots of horses to ride and new lands to tame, not to mention plenty of loved ones and good company—but it’s my responsibility to find out what went wrong. But, okay, if you’re unwilling, I’ll get Dr. Chang to come with me instead.”
I kind of liked that notion: Chang, the prick, screwed out of his heaven, whatever depraved sort of place that might be. Still, she was looking at me with palpable disappointment. There was no exit for her to march out of, no door to slam behind her. She just disappeared—poof!
I stood there under the canopy of skeletal branches, flaming leaves all around me. My simulated heart was pounding and there was a knot in the pit of my simulated stomach. It’s not that I was chicken, or anything, and, I know, I had signed a contract to do my job, but . . .
