Andrew Archer
Which brings us to our story…
Simon Okoro settled into a lawn chair in the Heaven runtime and watched as worlds were born.
“I suppose I should feel honored you chose to watch this with me,” said Martin as he sat down next to Simon. “Considering that you don’t believe I exist.”
“Can’t we just share a moment? It’s been years since we did anything together. And you worked toward this moment too. You deserve some recognition.”
“Ah. They sent you to acknowledge the Uploaded, is that it?” Martin turned his long, sad-eyed face to the sky and the drama playing out above. A The Heaven runtime was a fully virtual world, so Simon had converted the sky into a vast screen on which to project what was happening in the real world. The magnified surface of the sun made a curving arc from horizon to horizon. Jets and coronas rippled over it, and high, high above its incandescent surface hung thousands of solar statites shaped like mirrored flowers B.
They did not orbit, instead floating over a particular spot by light pressure alone. They formed a diffuse cloud, dwindling to invisibility before reaching the horizon. This telescope view showed the closest statite cores scattering fiery specks like spores into the overwhelming light. The specks blazed with light and shot away from the sun, accelerating.
This moment was the pinnacle of Simon’s career, the apex of his life’s work. Each of those specks was a solar sail C, kilometers wide, carrying a terraforming package D. Launched so close to the sun and supplemented with lasers powered by the statites, they would be traveling at 20 percent light speed by the time they left the solar system. At their destinations, they’d sundive and then deliver terraforming seeds to lifeless planets around the nearest stars.
“So life takes hold in the galaxy,” said Simon. These were the first words of a speech he’d written and rehearsed long ago. He’d dreamed of saying them on a podium, with Martin standing with him. But Martin…well, Martin had been dead for 20 years now.“
So life takes hold in the galaxy,” said Simon. These were the first words of a speech he’d written and rehearsed long ago. He’d dreamed of saying them on a podium, with Martin standing with him. But Martin…well, Martin had been dead for 20 years now.
He remembered the rest of the speech, but there was no point in giving it when he was absolutely alone.
Martin sighed. “So this is all you’re going to do with my Heaven? A little gardening? And then what? An orderly shutdown of the Heaven runtime? Sell off the Paradise processor as scrap?”
“I knew this was a bad idea.” Simon raised his hand to exit the virtual world, but Martin quickly stood, looking sorry.
“It’s just hard,” Martin said. “Paradise was supposed to be the great project to unite humanity. Our triumph over death! Why did you let them hijack it for this?”
Simon watched the spores catch the light and flash away into interstellar space. “You know we won’t shut you down. Heaven will be kept running as long as Paradise exists. We built it together, Martin, and I’m proud of what we did.”
The effort had been mind-bogglingly huge. They’d been able to do it only because millions of people believed that in dismantling Mercury
E and turning it into a sun-powered F quantum computer G there would be enough computing power for every living person to upload their consciousness into it. The goal had been to achieve eternal life in a virtual afterlife: the Heaven runtime.
Simon knit his hands together, lowering his eyes to the virtual garden. “Science happened, Martin. How were we to know Enactivism
H would answer the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness? You and I had barely even heard of extended consciousness when we proposed Heaven. It was an old idea from cognitive science. Nobody was even studying it anymore except a few AIs, and we were sucking up all the resources they might have used to experiment.” He glanced ruefully at Martin. “We were all blindsided when they proved it. Consciousness can’t be just abstracted from a brain.”
Martin’s response was quick; this was an old argument between them. “Nothing’s ever completely proven in science! There’s always room for doubt—but
you agreed with those AIs when they said that simulated consciousness can’t have subjective experiences. Conveniently after I died but before I got rebooted here. I wasn’t here to fight you.”
Martin snorted. “And now you think I’m a zimboe
I: a mindless simulation of the old Martin so accurate that I act exactly how he would if you told him he wasn’t self-aware. I deny it! Of course I do, like everyone else from that first wave of uploads.” He gestured, and throughout the simulated mountain valley, thousands of other human figures were briefly highlighted. “But what did it matter what I said, once I was in here? You’d already repurposed Paradise from humanity’s chance at immortality to just a simulator, using it to mimic billions of years of evolution on alien planets. All for this ridiculous scheme to plant ready-made, complete biospheres on them in advance of human colonization.” J
“We’d already played God with the inner solar system,” Simon reminded him. “The only way we could justify that after the Enactivism results was to find an even higher purpose than you and I started out with.
“Martin, I’m sorry you died before we discovered the truth. I fought to keep this subsystem running our original Heaven sim, because you’re right—there’s always a chance that the Enactivists are wrong. However slim.”
Martin snorted again. “I appreciate that. But things got very, very weird during your Enactivist rebellion. If I didn’t know better, I’d call this project”—he nodded at the sky—“the weirdest thing of all. Things are about to heat up now, though, aren’t they?”
“This was a mistake.” Simon sighed and flipped out of the virtual world. Let the simulated Martin rage in his artificial heaven; the science was unequivocal. In truth, Simon had been speaking only to himself for the entire conversation.
He stood now in the real world near the podium in a giant stadium, inside a wheel-shaped habitat 200 kilometers across. Hundreds of similar mini-ringworlds were spaced around the rim of Paradise.
Andrew Archer
Paradise itself was a vast bowl-shaped object, more cloud than material, orbiting closer to the sun than Mercury had. Self-reproducing machines had eaten that planet in a matter of decades, transforming its usable elements into a solar-powered quantum computer tens of thousands of kilometers across. The bowl cupped a spherical cloud of iron that acted as a radiator for the waste heat emitted by Paradise’s quadrillions of computing modules. K
The leaders of the terraforming project were on stage, taking their bows. The thousands of launches happening today were the culmination of decades of work: evolution on fast-forward, ecosystem after ecosystem, with DNA and seed designs for millions of new species fitted to thousands of worlds L.
It had to be done. Humans had never found another inhabited planet. That fact made life the most precious thing in the universe, and spreading it throughout the galaxy seemed a better ambition for humanity than building a false heaven.
M
Simon had reluctantly come to accept this. Martin was right, though. Things
had gotten weird. Paradise was such a good simulator that you could ask it to devise a machine to do X, and it would evolve its design in seconds. Solutions found through diffusion and selection were superior to algorithmically or human-designed ones, but it was rare that they could be reverse-engineered or their working principles even understood. And Paradise had computing power to spare, so in recent years, human and AI designers across the solar system had been idled as Paradise replaced their function. This, it was said, was the Technological Maximum; it was impossible for any civilization to attain a level of technological advancement beyond the point where any possible system could be instantly evolved.
Simon walked to where he could look past the open roof of the stadium to the dark azure sky. The vast sweep of the ring rose before and behind; in its center, a vast canted mirror reflected sunlight; to the left of that, he could see the milky white surface of the Paradise bowl. Usually, to the right, there was only blackness.
Today, he could see a sullen red glow. That would be Paradise’s radiator, expelling heat from the calculation of all those alien ecosystems. Except…
He found a quiet spot and sat, then reentered the Heaven simulation. Martin was still there, gazing at the sky.
Simon sat beside him. “What did you mean when you said things are heating up?”
Martin’s grin was slow and satisfied. “So you noticed.”
“Paradise isn’t supposed to be doing anything right now. All the terraforming packages were completed and copied to the sails—most of them years ago. Now they’re on their way, Paradise doesn’t have any duties, except maybe evolving better luxury yachts.”
Martin nodded. “Sure. And
is it doing anything?”
Simon still had read-access to Paradise’s diagnostics systems. He summoned a board that showed what the planet-size computing system was doing.
Nothing. It was nearly idle.
“If the system is idle, why is the radiator approaching its working limit?”
Martin crossed his arms, grinning. Damn it, he was enjoying this! Or the real Martin would be enjoying it, if he were here.
“You remember when the first evolved machines started pouring out of the printers?” Martin said. “Each one was unique; each grown for one owner, one purpose, one place. You said they looked alien, and I laughed and said, ‘How would we even know if an alien invasion was happening, if no two things look or work the same anymore?’ ”
“That’s when it started getting weird,” admitted Simon. “Weirder, I mean, than building an artificial heaven by dismantling Mercury…” But Martin wasn’t laughing at his feeble joke. He was shaking his head.
“No, that’s not when it got weird. It got weird when the telescopes we evolved to monitor the construction of Paradise noticed just how many objects pass through the solar system every year.”
“Interstellar wanderers? They’re just extrasolar comets,” said Simon. “You said yourself that rocks from other star systems must pass through ours all the time.” N
“Yes. But what I didn’t get to tell you—because I died—was that while we were building Paradise, several objects drifted from interstellar space into one side of the Paradise construction orbits…and didn’t come out the other side.”
Simon blinked. “Something arrived…and didn’t leave? Wouldn’t it have been eaten by the recycling planetoids?”
“You’d think. But there’s no record of it.”
“But what does this have to do with the radiator?”
Martin reached up and flicked through a few skies until he came to a view of the spherical iron cloud in the bowl of Paradise. “Remember why we even have a radiator?”
“Because there’s always excess energy left over from making a calculation. If it can’t be used for further calculations down the line, it’s literally meaningless, it has to be discarded.”
“Right. We designed Paradise in layers, so each layer would scavenge the waste from the previous one—optical computing on the sunward-facing skin, electronics further in. But inevitably, we ran out of architectures that could scavenge the excess. There is always an excess that is meaningless to the computing architecture at some point. So we built Paradise in the shape of a bowl, where all that extra heat would be absorbed by the iron cloud in its center. We couldn’t use that iron for transistors. The leftovers of Mercury were mostly a junk pile—but one we could use as a radiator.”
“But the radiator’s shedding heat like crazy! Where’s that coming from?” asked Simon.
“Let’s zoom in.” Martin put two fingers against the sky and pulled them apart. Whatever telescope he was linked to zoomed crazily; it felt like the whole world was getting yanked into the radiator. Simon was used to virtual worlds, so he just planted his feet and let the dizzying motion wash over him.
The radiator cloud filled the sky, at first just a dull red mist. But gradually Simon began to see structure to it: giant cells far brighter than the material around them. “Those look like…energy storage. Heat batteries. As if the radiator’s been storing some of the power coming through it. But why—”
Alerts from the real world suddenly blossomed in his visual field. He popped out of Martin’s virtual garden and into a confused roar inside the stadium.
The holographic image that filled the central space of the stadium showed the statite launchers hovering over the sun. One by one, they were folding in on themselves, falling silently into the incinerating heat below. The crowd was on its feet, people shouting in shock and fear. Now that the launchers had sent the terraforming systems, they were supposed to propel ships of colonists heading for the newly greened worlds. There were no more inner-solar-system resources left to build more.
Simon jumped back into VR. Martin was standing calmly in the garden, smiling at the intricate depths of the red-hot radiator that filled the sky. Simon followed his gaze and saw…
“Gears?” The radiator was a cloud, but only now was it revealing itself to be a cloud of clockwork elements that, when thermal energy brought them together, spontaneously assembled into more complex arrangements. And those were spinning and meshing in an intricate dance that stretched away into amber depths in all directions.
O
“It’s a dissipative system,” said Martin. “Sure, it radiates the heat our quantum computers can no longer use. But along the way, it’s using that energy to power an entirely different kind of computer. A Babbage engine the size of the moon.”
“But, Martin, the launchers—they’re all collapsing.”
Martin nodded. “Makes sense. The launchers accomplished their mission. Now they don’t want us following the seeds.”
“Not follow them? What do you mean?” An uneasy thought came to Simon; he tried to avoid it, but there was only one way this all made sense. “If the radiator was built to compute something, it must have been built with a way to output the result. This ‘they’ you’re talking about added a transmitter to the radiator. Then the radiator sent a virus or worm to the statites. The worm includes the radiator’s output. It hacked the statites’ security, and now that the seeds are in flight, it’s overwriting their code.”
Martin nodded.
“But why?” asked Simon.
Again, the answer was clear; Simon just didn’t want to admit it to himself. Martin waited patiently to hear Simon say it.
“They gave the terraformers new instructions.”
Martin nodded. “Think about it, Simon! We designed Paradise as a quantum computer that would be provably secure. We made it impossible to infect, and it is. Whatever arrived while we were building it didn’t bother to mess with it, where our attention was. It just built its own system where we wouldn’t even think to look. Made out of and using our garbage. Probably modified the maintenance robots tending the radiator into making radical changes.
“And what’s it been doing? I should think that was obvious. It’s been designing terraforming systems for the exoplanets, just like you have, but to make them habitable for an entirely different kind of colonist.”
Simon looked aghast at Martin. “And you knew?”
“Well.” Martin slouched, looked askance at Simon. “Not the details, until just now. But listen: You abandoned us—all who died and were uploaded before the Enactivist experiments ‘proved’ we aren’t real. All us zimboes, trapped here now for eternity. Even if I’m just a simulation of your friend Martin, how do you think he’d feel in this situation? He’d feel betrayed. Maybe he couldn’t escape this virtual purgatory, but if he knew something that you didn’t—that humanity’s new grand project had been hijacked by a virus from somewhere else—why would he tell you?”
No longer hiding his anger, Martin came up to Simon and jabbed a virtual finger at his chest. “Why would I tell you when I could just stand back and watch all of this unfold?” He spread his arms, as if to embrace the clockwork sky, and laughed.
On thousands of sterile exoplanets, throughout all the vast sphere of stars within a hundred light-years of the sun, life was about to blossom—life, or something else. Whatever it would be, humanity would never be welcome on those worlds. “If they had any interest in talking to us, they would have, wouldn’t they?” sighed Simon.
“I guess you’re not real to them, Simon. I wonder, how does that feel?”
Martin was still talking as Simon exited the virtual heaven where his best friend was trapped, and he knew he would never go back. Still, ringing in his ears as the stadium of confused, shouting people rose up around him were Martin’s last, vicious words:
“How does it feel to be left behind, Simon?
“How does it feel?”
Story by
KARL SCHROEDER
Annotations by
CHARLES Q. CHOI
Illustrations by
ANDREW ARCHER
Edited by
STEPHEN CASS
Story by
KARL SCHROEDER
Annotations by
CHARLES Q. CHOI
Illustrations by
ANDREW ARCHER
Edited by
STEPHEN CASS
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