THE GODS HAVE NOT DIED IN VAIN
Ken Liu
I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, “Here is one hand,” and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, “and here is another.”
Cloud-born, cloud-borne, she was a mystery.
• • • •
Maddie first met her sister through a chat window, after her father, one of the uploaded consciousnesses in a new age of gods, died.
So that was how Maddie came to call her sister “Mist”: the pylon of a suspension bridge, perhaps the Golden Gate, hidden behind San Francisco’s famous fog.
Maddie kept the existence of Mist a secret from her mother.
After all the wars initiated by the uploaded consciousnesses — some of which were still smoldering — the reconstruction process was slow and full of uncertainty. Hundreds of millions had died on other continents, and though America had been spared the worst of it, the country was still in chaos as infrastructure collapsed and refugees poured into the big cities. Her mother, who now acted as an advisor to the city government of Boston, worked long hours and was exhausted all the time.
First, she needed to confirm that Mist was telling the truth, so Maddie asked her to reveal herself.
For digital entities like Maddie’s father, there was a ground truth, a human-readable representation of the instructions and data adapted for the different processors of the interconnected global network. Maddie’s father had taught her to read it after he had reconnected with her following his death and resurrection. It looked like code written in some high-level programming language, replete with convoluted loops and cascading conditionals, elaborate lambda expressions and recursive definitions consisting of strings of mathematical symbols.
Maddie would have called such a thing “source code,” except she had learned from her father that that notion was inaccurate: He and the other gods had never been compiled from source code into executable code, but were developed by AI techniques that replicated the workings of neural networks directly in machine language. The human-readable representation was more like a map of the reality of this new mode of existence.
Without hesitation, Mist revealed her map to Maddie when asked. Not all of herself, explained Mist. She was a distributed being, vast and constantly self-modifying. To show all of herself in map code would take up so much space and require so much time for Maddie to read that they might as well wait for the end of the universe. Instead, Mist showed her some highlights:
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((lambda (n1) ((lambda (n2 . . .
As Maddie scrolled through the listing, she traced the complex logical paths, followed the patterns of multiple closures and thrown continuations, discovered the contours of a way of thinking that was at once familiar and strange. It was like looking at a map of her own mind, but one where the landmarks were strange and the roads probed into terra incognita.
There were echoes of her father in the code — she could see that: a quirky way of associating words with images; a tendency to see patterns that defied the strictly rational; a deep, abiding trust for a specific woman and a specific teenager out of the billions who lived on this planet.
Maddie was reminded of how Mom had told her that there were things about her as a baby that defied theories of upbringing, that told her and Dad that Maddie was their child in a way that transcended rational knowledge: the way her smile reminded Mom of Dad even at six weeks; the way she hated noodles the first time she tried them, just like Mom; the way she calmed down as soon as Dad held her, even though he had been too busy with Logorhythms’s IPO to spend much time with her during the first six months of her life.
But there were also segments of Mist that puzzled her: the way she seemed to possess so many heuristics for trends in the stock market; the way her thoughts seemed attuned to the subtleties of patents; the way the shapes of her decision algorithms seemed adapted for the methods of warfare. Some of the map code reminded Maddie of the code of other gods Dad had shown her; some was entirely novel.
Maddie had a million questions for Mist. How had she come to be? Was she like Athena, sprung fully-formed from her father’s mind? Or was she something like the next generation of an evolutionary algorithm, inheriting bits from her father and other uploaded consciousnesses with variations? Who was her other parent — or maybe parents? What stories of love, of yearning, of loneliness and connection, lay behind her existence? What was it like being a creature of pure computation, of never having existed in the flesh?
But of one thing Maddie was certain: Mist was her father’s daughter, just as she had claimed. She was her sister, even if she was barely human.
• • • •
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Like her father, Mist had a habit of shifting into emoji whenever she found words inadequate. What Maddie got out of her response was that life in the cloud was simply beyond her understanding and Mist did not have the words to adequately convey it.
So Maddie tried to bridge the gap the other way, to tell Mist about her own life.
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Other attempts by Maddie to share the details of her own life usually ended the same way. She mentioned the way Basil wagged his tail and licked her fingers when she came in the door, and Mist responded with articles about the genetics of dogs. Maddie started to talk about the anxieties she experienced at school and the competing cliques, and Mist showed her pages of game theory and papers on adolescent psychology.
Maddie could understand it, to some extent. After all, Mist had never lived in the world that Maddie inhabited, and never would. All Mist had was data about the world, not the world itself. How could Mist understand how Maddie felt? Words or emoji were inadequate to convey the essence of reality.
Life is about embodiment, thought Maddie. This was a point that she had discussed with Dad many times. To experience the world through the senses was different from simply having data about the world. The memory of his time in the world was what had kept her father sane after he had been turned into a brain in a jar.
And in this way, oddly, Maddie came to have a glint of the difficulty Mist faced in explaining her world to Maddie. She tried to imagine what it was like to have never petted a puppy, to have never experienced a tomato filled with June sunshine burst between the tongue and the palate, to have never felt the weight of gravity or the elation of being loved, and imagination failed her. She felt sorry for Mist, a ghost who could not even call upon the memory of an embodied existence.
• • • •
There was one topic on which Maddie and Mist could converse effectively: the shared mission their father had left them to make sure the gods didn’t come back.
All of the uploaded consciousnesses — whose existence was still never acknowledged — were supposed to have died in the conflagration. But pieces of their code, like the remnants of fallen giants, were scattered around the world’s servers. Mist told Maddie that mysterious network presences scoured the web to collect these pieces. Were they hackers? Spies? Corporate researchers? Defense contractors? What purpose could they have for gathering these relics unless they were interested in resurrecting the gods?
Along with these troubling reports, Mist also brought back headlines that she thought Maddie would find interesting.
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Japanese PM Assures Nervous Citizens That New Robots Deployed for Reconstruction Are Safe
European Union Announces Border Closures; Extra-European Economic Migrants Not Welcome
Bill to Restrict Immigration to “Extraordinary Circumstances” Passes Senate; Majority of Working Visas to Be Revoked
Protestors Demanding Jobs Clash with Police in New York and Washington, D.C.
Developing Nations Press UN Security Council for Resolution Denouncing Efforts to Restrict Population Migration by Developed Economies.
Collapse of Leading Asian Economies Predicted as Manufacturing Sector Continues Contraction Due to Back-Shoring by Europe and the US
Everlasting Inc. Refuses to Explain Purpose of New Data Center
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Mist’s consciousness operated at the speed of electric currents fluctuating billions of times a second instead of slow, analog, electrochemical synapses. Her experience of time must be so different, so fast that it made Maddie a little bit envious.
And she came to appreciate just how patient her father had been with her when he was a ghost in the machine. In every exchange between him and Maddie, he probably had had to wait what must have felt like eons before getting an answer from her, but he had never shown any annoyance.
Maybe that was why he had created another daughter, Maddie thought. Someone who lived and thought like him.
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Adam Ever, the founder of Everlasting, Inc. was one of the foremost experts on the Singularity. He had been a friend of Dad’s, and Maddie vaguely recalled meeting him as a little girl. Ever was a persistent advocate of consciousness uploading, even after all the legal restrictions placed on his research after the crisis. Maddie’s curiosity was tinged with dread.
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Maddie shuddered. She recalled the epic fights between her father, Lowell, and Chanda in the darkness of the network. The phrase “lost a few parts” might sound innocuous, but for Mist it probably felt like losing limbs and parts of her mind.
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• • • •
Maddie made dinner that night. Her mother texted her that she was going to be late, first thirty minutes, then an hour, and then “not sure.” Maddie ended up eating alone and then spent the rest of the evening watching the clock and worrying.
“Sorry,” Mom said as she came in, close to midnight. “They kept me late.”
Maddie had seen some of the reports on TV. “Protestors?”
Mom sighed. “Yes. Not as bad as in New York, but hundreds showed up. I had to talk to them.”
“What are they mad about? It’s not like —” Maddie caught herself just as she was about to raise her voice. She was feeling protective of her mother, but her mother had probably had enough shouting for one day.
“They’re good people,” Mom said vaguely. She headed for the stairs without even glancing at the kitchen. “I’m tired. I think I’ll just go to bed.”
But Maddie was unwilling to just let it go. “Are we having supply issues again?” The recovery was jittery, and goods were still being rationed. It was a constant struggle to get people to stop hoarding.
Mom stopped. “No. The supplies are flowing smoothly again, maybe too smoothly.”
“I don’t understand,” said Maddie.
Mom sat down on the bottom of the stairs, and patted the space next to her. Maddie went over and sat down.
“Remember how during the crisis, when we were coming to Boston, I told you about layers of technology?”
Maddie nodded. Her mother, a historian, had told her the story behind the networks that connected people: the footpaths that grew into caravan routes that developed into roads that turned into railroad tracks that provided the right-of-way for the optical cables that carried the bits that made up the Internet that routed the thoughts of the gods.
“The history of the world is a process of speeding up, of becoming more efficient as well as more fragile. If a footpath is blocked, you just have to walk around it. But if a highway is blocked, you have to wait until specialized machinery can be brought to clear it. Just about anyone can figure out how to patch a cobblestone road, but only highly trained technicians can fix a fiberoptic cable. There’s a lot more redundancy with the older, inefficient technologies.”
“Your point is that keeping it simple technologically is more resilient,” said Maddie.
“But our history is also a history of growing needs, of more mouths to feed and more hands that need to be kept from idleness,” said Mom.
Mom told Maddie that America had been lucky during the crisis: very few bombs had struck her shores and relatively few people had died during the riots. But with much of the infrastructure paralyzed across the country, refugees flooded into the big cities. Boston’s own population had doubled from what it was before the crisis. With so many people came spiking needs: food, clothing, shelter, sanitation . . .
“On my advice, the governor and the mayor tried to rely on distributed, self-organizing groups of citizens with low-tech delivery methods, but we couldn’t get it to work because it was just too inefficient. Congestion and breakdowns were happening too frequently. Centillion’s automation proposal had to be considered.”
Maddie thought of how impatient Mist had been with her “slow cycles,” and she imagined the roads packed with self-driving trucks streaming bumper-to-bumper at a hundred miles an hour, without drivers who had to rest, without the traffic jams caused by human unpredictability, without the accidents from drifting attentions and exhausted bodies. She thought of tireless robots loading and unloading the supplies necessary to keep millions of people fed and warm and clothed. She thought of the borders patrolled by machines with precise algorithms designed to preserve precious supplies for the use of people with the right accents, the right skin colors, the luck to be born in the right places at the right times.
“All the big cities are doing the same thing,” said Mom, a trace of defensiveness in her voice. “It’s impossible for us to hold out. It would be irresponsible, as Centillion put it.”
“And the drivers and workers would be replaced,” said Maddie, understanding finally dawning on her.
“They showed up on Beacon Hill to protest, hoping to save their jobs. But an even bigger crowd showed up to protest against them.” Mom rubbed her temples.
“If everything is handed over to Centillion’s robots, wouldn’t another god — I mean a rogue AI — put us at even more risk?”
“We have grown to the point where we must depend on machines to survive,” said Mom. “The world has become too fragile for us to count on people, and so our only choice is to make it even more fragile.”
• • • •
With Centillion’s robots taking over the crucial work of maintaining the flow of goods into the city, a superficial calmness returned to life. The workers who lost their jobs were given new jobs invented by the government: correcting typos in old databases, sweeping corners of streets that Centillion’s robots couldn’t get to, greeting concerned citizens in the lobby of the State House and giving them tours — some grumbled that this was just a dressed-up form of welfare and what was the government going to do when Centillion and PerfectLogic and ThoughtfulBits and their ilk automated more jobs away?
But at least everyone was getting a paycheck that they could use to buy the supplies brought into the city by the fleet of robots. And Centillion’s CEO swore up and down on TV that they weren’t developing anything that could be understood as “rogue AI,” like the old, dead gods.
That was good, wasn’t it?
Maddie and Mist continued to gather pieces of the old gods and studying them to see what Everlasting might want with them. Some of the fragments had belonged to her father, but there were too few of them to even dream of trying to resurrect him. Maddie wasn’t sure how she felt about it — in a way, her father had never fully reconciled to his existence as a disembodied consciousness, and she wasn’t sure he would want to “come back.”
Meanwhile, Maddie was working on a secret project. It would be her present to Mist.
She looked up everything she could online about robotics and electronics and sensor technology. She bought components online, which Centillion drones cheerfully and efficiently delivered to her house — straight to her room, even: she kept the window of her room open, and tiny drones with whirring rotors flitted in at all hours of the day and night, dropping off tiny packages.
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Hundreds Die in Attempt to Scale “Freedom Wall” near El Paso
Think Tank Argues Coal Should be Reevaluated as Alternative Energy Fails to Meet Promise
Deaths from Typhoons in Southeast Asia Exceed Historical Records
Experts Warn of Further Regional Conflicts as Food Prices Soar and Drought Continues in Asia and Africa
Unemployment Numbers Suggest Reconstruction Has Benefited Robots (and Their Owners) More Than People
Rise of Religious Extremism Tied to Stagnating Developing Economies
Is Your Job at Risk? Experts Explain How to Protect Yourself from Automation
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Maddie plugged her new creation into the computer.
The lights near the data port on the computer began to blink.
Maddie smiled to herself. For Mist, asking Maddie a question and waiting for her slow cycles to catch up and answer was probably like sending snail mail. It would be far faster for her to investigate the new contraption herself.
The motors in Maddie’s creation spun to life, and the three wheels in the base turned the four-foot-tall torso around. The wheels provided 360° of motion, much like those roving automatic vacuum cleaners.
At the top of the cylindrical torso was a spherical “head” to which were attached the best sensors that Maddie could scrounge up or buy: a pair of high-def cameras to give stereoscopic vision; a matched pair of microphones to act as ears, tuned for the range of human hearing; a sophisticated bundle of probes mounted at the ends of flexible antennae to act as noses and tongues that approximated the sensitivity of human counterparts; and numerous other tactile sensors, gyroscopes, accelerometers, and so on to give the robot the experience of touch, gravity, presence in space.
Away from the head, near the top of the cylindrical body, however, were the most expensive components of them all: a pair of multi-jointed arms with parallel-elastic actuators to recreate the freedom of motion of human arms that ended in a pair of the most advanced prosthetic hands covered in medical-grade plastiskin. The skin, embedded with sensors for temperature and force, were said to approach or even exceed the sensitivity of real skin, and the fingers modeled human hands so well that they could tighten a nut on a screw as well as pick up a strand of hair. Maddie watched as Mist tried them out, flexing and clenching the fingers, and without realizing it, she mirrored the movements with her own fingers.
“What do you think?” she said.
The screen mounted atop the head of the robot came to life, showing a cartoonish pair of eyes, a cute button nose, and a pair of abstract, wavy lines that mimicked the motion of lips. Maddie was proud of the design and programming of the face. She had modeled it on her own.
A voice came out of the speaker below the screen. “This is very well made.” It was a young girl’s voice, chirpy and mellifluous.
“Thank you,” said Maddie. She watched as Mist moved around the room, twisting her head this way and that, sweeping her camera-gaze over everything. “Do you like your new body?”
“It’s interesting,” said Mist. The tone was the same as before. Maddie couldn’t tell if that was because Mist was really pleased with the robotic body or that she hadn’t figured out how to modulate the voice to suit her emotional state.
“I can show you all the things you haven’t experienced before,” said Maddie hurriedly. “You’ll know what it’s like to move in the real world, not just as a ghost in a machine. You’ll be able to understand my stories, and I can take you on trips with me, introduce you to Mom and other people.”
Mist continued to move around the room, her eyes surveying the trophies on Maddie’s shelves, the titles of her books, the posters on her walls, the models of the planets and rocketships hanging from the ceiling — a record of Maddie’s shifting tastes over the years. She moved toward one corner where a basket of stuffed animals was kept, but stopped when the data cable stretched taut, just a few centimeters too short.
“The cable is necessary for now because the amount of data from the sensors is so large. But I’m working on a compression algorithm so we can get you wireless.”
Mist moved the swiveling screen with her cartoonish face forward and backward to simulate a nod. Maddie was grateful that she had thought of such a thing — a lot of the robotics papers on robot-human interactions emphasized that rather than simulating a human face too closely and falling into the uncanny valley, it was better sticking to cartoonish representations that exaggerated the emotional tenor. Sometimes an obviously virtual representation was better than a strict effort at fidelity.
Mist paused in front of a mess of wires and electronic components on Maddie’s shelf. “What’s this?”
“The first computer that Dad and I built together,” said Maddie. Instantly, she seemed to have been transported to that summer almost a decade ago, when Dad showed her how to apply Ohm’s Law to pick out the right resistors and how to read a circuit diagram and translate it into real components and real wires. The smell of hot solder filled her nostrils again, and she smiled even as her eyes moistened.
Mist picked up the contraption with her hands.
“Be careful!” Maddie yelled.
But it was too late. The breadboard crumbled in Mist’s hands, and the pieces fell to the carpet.
“Sorry,” said Mist. “I thought I was applying the right amount of pressure based on the materials used in it.”
“Things get old in the real world,” said Maddie. She bent down to pick up the pieces from the carpet, carefully cradling them in her hand. “They grow fragile.” She looked at the remnants of her first unskilled attempt at soldering, noticing the lumpy messes and bent electrodes. “I guess you don’t have much experience with that.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mist again, her voice still chirpy.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Maddie, trying to be magnanimous. “Think of it as a first lesson about the real world. Hold on.”
She rushed out of the room and returned a moment later with a ripe tomato. “This is shipped in from some industrial farm, and it’s nowhere as good as the ones Grandma and I grew back in Pennsylvania. Still, now you can taste it. Don’t talk to me about lycopene and sugar content; taste it.”
Mist took the tomato from her — this time her mechanical hands held it lightly, the fingers barely making an impression against the smooth fruit skin. She gazed at it, the lenses of her cameras whirring as they focused. And then, decisively, one of the probes on her head shot out and stabbed into the fruit in a single motion.
It reminded Maddie of a mosquito’s proboscis stabbing into the skin of a hand, or a butterfly sipping nectar from a flower. A sense of unease rose in her. She was trying so hard to make Mist human, but what made her think that was what Mist wanted?
“It’s very good,” said Mist. She swiveled her screen toward Maddie so that Maddie could see her cartoonish eyes curving in a smile. “You’re right. It’s not as good as the heirloom varieties.”
Maddie laughed. “How would you know that?”
“I’ve tasted hundreds of varieties of tomatoes,” said Mist.
“Where? How?”
“Before the war of the gods, all the big instant meal manufacturers and fast food restaurants used automation to produce recipes. Dad took me through a few of these facilities and I tried every variety of tomato from Amal to Zebra Cherry — I was a big fan of Snow White.”
“Machines were making up the recipes?” Maddie asked. She had loved watching cooking shows before the war, and chefs were artists, what they did was creative. She couldn’t quite wrap her head around the notion of machines making up recipes.
“Sure. At the scale these places were operating, they had to optimize for so many factors that people could never get it right. The recipes had to be tasty and also use ingredients that could be obtained within the constraints of modern mechanized agriculture — it was no good to discover some good recipe that relied on an heirloom variety that couldn’t be grown in large enough quantities efficiently.”
Maddie thought back to her conversation with Mom and realized that it was the same concept that now governed the creation of ration packets: nutritious, tasty, but also effective for feeding hundreds of millions living with a damaged grid and limited resources.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’ve tasted tomatoes?” Maddie asked. “I thought you were —”
“Not just tomatoes. I’ve had every variety of potato, squash, cucumber, apple, grape, and lots of other things you’ve never had. In the food labs, I tried out billions of flavor combinations. The sensors they had were far more sensitive than the human tongue.”
The robot that had once seemed such an extraordinary gift now seemed shabby to Maddie. Mist did not need a body. She had been living in a far more embodied way than Maddie had realized or understood.
Mist simply didn’t think the new body was all that special.
• • • •
Expert Report Declares Nuclear Fallout Clean Up Plan in Asia Unrealistic, Further Famines Inevitable
Japan Joins China and India in Denouncing Western Experts for “Scaremongering”
Indian Geoengineering Plan to Melt Himalayan Snow for Agricultural Irrigation Leaked, Drawing Condemnation from Smaller SE Asian Nations for “Water Theft”
Protestors in Italy and Spain Declare “African Refugees Should Go Home”: Thousands Injured in Clashes
Australia Announces Policy of Shooting on Sight to Discourage “Boat People”
Regional “Resource Wars” May Turn Global, UN Special Commission Warns
White House Stands Firm Behind “NATO First” Doctrine: Use of Military Force Is Justified to Stop Geoengineering Projects That May Harm Allies or US Interests
Mom was working late most nights now, and she looked pale and sickly. Maddie didn’t have to ask to know that reconstruction was going worse than anyone expected. The war of the gods had left so much of the planet’s surface in tatters that the survivors were fighting over the leftover scraps. No matter how many refugee boats were sunk by drones or how high the walls were built, desperate people continued to pour into the US, the country least damaged by the war.
Protests and counter-protests raged in the streets of all the major cities day after day. Nobody wanted to see kids and women drown in the sea or electrocuted by the walls, but it was also true that all the American cities were overburdened. Even the efficient robots couldn’t keep up with the task of making sure everyone was fed and safe.
Maddie could tell that the ration packets were going down in quality. This couldn’t go on. The world was continuing its long spiral down toward an abyss, and sooner or later, someone was going to conclude that the problems were not solvable by AI alone, and we needed to call upon the gods again.
She and Mist had to prevent that. The world couldn’t afford another reign of the gods.
While Mist — possibly the greatest hacker there ever was — focused on testing out the defenses around Everlasting and figuring out a way to penetrate them, Maddie devoted her time to trying to understand the fragments of the dead gods.
The map code, a combination of self-modifying AI and modeling of human thinking patterns, wasn’t the sort of thing a programmer would write, but Maddie seemed to have an intuition for how personality quirks manifested in this code after spending so much time with the fragments of her father.
In this manner, Maddie came also to understand Chanda and Lowell and the other gods. She charted their hopes and dreams, like fragments of Sappho and Aeschylus. And it turned out that deep down, all the gods had similar vulnerabilities, a kind of regret or nostalgia for life in the flesh that seemed reflected at every level of organization. It was a blind spot, a vulnerability that could be exploited in the war against the gods.
“I don’t have a weak spot like that in my code,” said Mist.
Maddie was startled. She had never really considered Mist one of the gods, though, objectively, she clearly was. Mist was just her little sister, especially when she was embedded in the cute robot Maddie had built for her, as she was now.
“Why not?” she asked.
“I am a child of the ether,” said Mist. And the voice was now different. It sounded older, wearier. Maddie would almost have said it sounded not human. “I do not yearn for something that I never had.”
Of course Mist wasn’t a little girl, Maddie berated herself. She had somehow allowed the cartoonish trappings she had created for Mist, a mask intended to help Mist relate to her, fool her. Mist’s thoughts moved at a far faster pace, and she had experienced more of the world than Maddie had ever experienced. She could, at will, peek through billions of cameras, listen through billions of microphones, sense the speed of the wind atop Mount Washington and at the same time feel the heat of the lava spilling out of Kilauea. She had known what it’s like to gaze down at the world from the international space station and what it was like to suffer the stress of kilometers of water pressing down upon a deep-sea submersible’s shell. She was, in a way, far older than Maddie.
“I’m going to make a run at Everlasting,” said Mist. “With your discoveries, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be. They might already be creating new gods.”
Maddie wanted to tell Mist some words of comfort, assuring her of success. But really, what did she know of the risks Mist was undertaking? She wasn’t the one to put her life on the line in that unimaginable realm inside the machine.
The features on the screen that served as Mist’s face disappeared, leaving only a single emoji.
“We’ll protect each other,” Maddie said. “We will.”
But even she knew how inadequate that sounded.
• • • •
Maddie woke up with a start as cold hands caressed her face.
She sat up. The small bedside lamp was on. Next to her bed was the squat figure of the robot, whose cameras were trained on her. She had fallen asleep after seeing Mist off, though she hadn’t meant to.
“Mist,” she said, rubbing her eyes, “are you okay?”
The cartoonish face of Mist was replaced by a headline.
Everlasting Inc. Announces “Digital Adam” Project
“What?” asked Maddie, her thoughts still sluggish.
“I better let him tell you,” said Mist. And then the screen changed again, and a man’s face appeared on it. He was in his thirties, with short-cropped hair and a kind, compassionate face.
All traces of sleep left Maddie. This was a face she had seen many times on TV, always making reassurances to the public: Adam Ever.
“What are you doing here?” asked Maddie. “What have you done to Mist?”
The robot that had housed Mist — no, Adam now — held up his hands in a gesture intended to calm. “I’m just here to talk.”
“What about?”
“Let me show you what we’ve been working on.”
• • • •
Maddie flew over a fjord filled with floating icebergs until she was skimming over a field of ice. A great black cube loomed out of this landscape of shades of white.
“Welcome to the Longyearbyen Data Center,” Adam Ever’s voice spoke in her ears.
The VR headset was something Maddie had once used to game with her father, but it had been gathering dust on the shelf since his death. Adam had asked her to put it on.
Maddie had known of the data center’s existence from Mist’s reports, and had even seen some photographs and videos of its construction. She and Mist had speculated that this was where Everlasting was trying to resurrect the old gods or bring forth new ones.
Adam told her about the massive assembly of silicon and graphene inside, about the zipping electrons and photons bouncing inside glass cables. This was an altar to computation, a Stonehenge for a new age.
“It’s also where I live,” Adam said.
The scene before Maddie’s eyes shifted, and she was now looking at Adam calmly lying down on a hospital bed, smiling for the camera. Doctors and beeping machines were clustered around the bed. They typed some commands into a computer, and after a while Adam closed his eyes, going to sleep.
Maddie suddenly had the sensation that she was witnessing a scene similar to the last moments of her father.
“Were you ill?” she asked hesitantly.
“No,” said Adam. “I was in the prime of health. This is a video recording of the moment before the scan. I had to be alive to give the procedure the maximal chance for success.”
Maddie imagined the doctors approaching the sleeping figure of Adam with scalpel and bone saw and who knew what else — she was about to scream when the scene shifted mercifully away to a room of pure white with Adam sitting up in a bed. Maddie let out a held breath.
“You survived the scan?” asked Maddie.
“Of course,” said Adam.
But Maddie sensed that this wasn’t quite right. Earlier, in the video, there were wrinkles near the corners of Adam’s eyes. The face of the Adam in front of her now was perfectly smooth.
“It’s not you,” said Maddie. “It’s not you.”
“It is me,” insisted Adam. “The only me that matters.”
Maddie closed her eyes and thought back to the times Adam had appeared on TV in interviews. He had said he didn’t want to leave Svalbard, preferring to conduct all his interviews remotely via satellite feed. The camera had always stayed close up, showing just his face. Now that she was looking for it, she realized that the way Adam had moved in those interviews had seemed just slightly odd, a little uncanny.
“You died,” said Maddie. She opened her eyes and looked at the Adam, this Adam with the smooth, perfectly symmetrical face and impossibly graceful limbs. “You died during the scan because there’s no way to do a scan without destroying the body.”
Adam nodded. “I’m one of the gods.”
“Why?” Maddie couldn’t imagine such a thing. All of the gods had been created as a last measure of desperation, a way to preserve their minds for the service of the goals of others. Her father had raged against his fate and fought so that none of the others had to go through what he did. To choose to become a brain in a jar was inconceivable to her.
“The world is dying, Maddie,” said Adam. “You know this. Even before the wars, we were killing the planet slowly. There were too many of us squabbling over too few resources, and to stay alive we had to hurt the world even more, polluting the water and air and soil so that we might extract more. The wars only accelerated what was already an inevitable trend. There are too many of us for this planet to support. The next time we fight a war, there won’t be any more of us to save after the nukes are done falling.”
“It’s not true!” Even as she said it, Maddie knew that Adam was right. The headlines and her own research had long ago led her to the same conclusion. He’s right. She felt very tired. “Are we the cancer of this planet?”
“We’re not the problem,” said Adam.
Maddie looked at him.
“Our bodies are,” said Adam. “Our bodies of flesh exist in the realm of atoms. Our senses require the gratification of matter. Not all of us can live the lifestyle we believe we deserve. Scarcity is the root of all evil.”
“What about space, the other planets and stars?”
“It’s too late for that. We’ve hardly taken another step on the moon, and most of the rockets we’ve been building since then have been intended to deliver bombs.”
Maddie said nothing. “You’re saying there is no hope?”
“Of course there is.” Adam waved his arm, and the white room transformed into the inside of a luxurious apartment. The hospital bed disappeared, and Adam was now standing in the middle of a well-appointed room. The lights of Manhattan shone beyond the darkened windows.
Adam waved his arm again, and now they were inside a voluminous space capsule. Outside the window loomed a partial view of a massive sphere of swirling bands of color, and a giant red oval slowly drifted among the bands like an island in a turbulent sea.
Once more, Adam waved his arm, and now it wasn’t even possible for Maddie to understand what she was seeing. There seemed to be a smaller Adam inside Adam, and yet a smaller Adam inside that one, and so on, ad infinitum. Yet she was somehow able to see all of the Adams at once. She moved her gaze around the space and felt dizzy: space itself seemed to gain an extra level of depth, and everywhere she looked she saw inside things.
“We could have all we ever desire,” said Adam, “if we’re willing to give up our bodies.”
A disembodied existence, thought Maddie. Is that really living at all?
“But this isn’t real,” said Maddie. “This is just an illusion.” She thought of the games she used to play with her father, of the green seas of grass that seemed to go on forever, of the babbling brooks that promised infinite zoom, of the fantastic creatures they had fought against, side by side.
“Consciousness itself is an illusion, if you want to follow that logic to its conclusion,” said Adam. “When you put your hand around a tomato, your senses insist that you’re touching something solid. But most of a tomato is made up of the empty space between the nuclei of the atoms, as far from each other, by proportion, as the stars are apart. What is color? What is sound? What is heat or pain? They’re but pulses of electricity that make up our consciousness, and it makes no difference whether the pulse comes from a sensor touching a tomato or is the result of computation.”
“Except there is a difference,” the voice of Mist said.
Maddie’s heart swelled with gratitude. Her sister was coming to her defense. Or so she thought.
“A tomato made up of atoms is grown in a distant field, where it must be given fertilizer mined from halfway across the world and dusted with insecticide by machines. Then it must be harvested, packed, and then shipped through the airways and highways until it arrives at your door. The amount of energy it takes to run the infrastructure that would support the creation and delivery of a single tomato is many times what it took to build the Great Pyramid. Is it really worth enslaving the whole planet so that you can have the experience of a tomato through the interface of the flesh instead of generating the same impulse from a bit of silicon?”
“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” said Maddie. “My grandmother and I grew our tomatoes on our own, and we didn’t need any of that.”
“You can’t feed billions of people with backyard gardens,” said Mist. “Nostalgia for a garden that never existed is dangerous. The mass of humanity depends on the fragile, power-intensive infrastructure of civilization. It is delusion to think you can live without it.”
Maddie remembered the words of her mother. The world has become too fragile for us to count on people.
“The world of atoms is not only wasteful, it is also limiting,” said Adam. “Inside the data center, we can live anywhere we want and have whatever we want, with imagination as our only limit. We can experience things that our fleshly senses could never give us: live in multiple dimensions, invent impossible foods, possess worlds that are as infinite as the sands of the Ganges.”
A world beyond scarcity, thought Maddie. A world without rich or poor, without the conflicts generated by exclusion and possession. It was a world without death, without decay, without the limits of inflexible matter. It was a state of existence mankind had always yearned for.
“Don’t you miss the real world?” asked Maddie. She thought of the vulnerability that existed at the heart of all the gods.
“We discovered the same thing you did by studying the gods,” said Adam. “Nostalgia is deadly. When peasants first moved into the factories of the industrial age, perhaps they also were nostalgic for the inefficient world of subsistence farming. But we must be open to change, to adaptation, to seeking a new path in a sea of fragility. Instead of being forced here on the verge of death like your father, I chose to come here. I am not nostalgic. That makes all the difference.”
“He’s right,” said Mist. “Our father understood that, too. Maybe this is why he and the other gods gave birth to me: to see if their nostalgia is as inevitable as death. They couldn’t adapt to this world fully, but maybe their children could. In a way, Dad gave birth to me because, deep down, he wished you could live here with him.”
Mist’s observation seemed to Maddie like a betrayal, but she couldn’t say why.
“This is the next stage of our evolution,” said Adam. “This isn’t going to be a perfect world, but it is closer to perfect than anything we’ve ever devised. The human race thrives on discovering new worlds, and now there are an infinite many of them to explore. We shall reign as the gods of them all.”
• • • •
Maddie took off her VR set. Next to the vibrant colors inside the digital world, the physical world seemed dim and dull.
She imagined the data center teeming with the consciousnesses of billions. Would that bring people closer, so that they all shared the same universe without the constraints of scarcity? Or would it push them apart, so that each lived in their own world, a king of infinite space?
She held out her hands. She noticed that they were becoming wrinkled, the hands of a woman rather than a child.
After the briefest of pauses, Mist rolled over and held them.
“We’ll protect each other,” said Mist. “We will.”
They held hands in the dark, sisters, human and post-human, and waited for the new day to come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. A collection of his short stories will also be published by Saga in 2015.