He knew something was wrong when the sun came up in the west.
All evening at this party he had felt uneasy. Things just . . . slid away. This lawn, for example.
The whole vast lawn party was backdrop, no better than it had to be. The crowd did not repeat often, but three times he saw the same lithe woman making her stylish way on the exact same route, ignoring everyone. Most of the crowd was like that: passing by, as unreachable as a distant star.
The gaudy orange sunrise over the western sea was the giveaway. Everybody made mistakes. He tossed back more champagne as the crowd ooohed and ahhhhed at the spectacular, phony dawn.
No way around it: he was a Copy, a Ditto. A computer simulation.
This slim, athletic body of his, which had already coupled with two delicious ladies in the night-long party: it was too good. His real self was fatter, slower, less charming.
His job was to create such simulations. Small wonder, then, that his real self had made this Copy.
The tasty food, potent drink (which stimulated without getting him drunk; another give-away) -- all were a set of recipes for seeming like himself. No underlying physics or biology, just a good-enough fake, put in by hand . . . his Real Self hand.
He moved inside, walked the vast, elegant rooms, exchanged chit-chat with the charming friends. All fake.
He had been abstracted into a neural network, a lattice of digital gates, a stream of 0s and 1s. Even his own visceral sense of Self, seemingly rock-solid, was just a patched-in slug of digits, a bag of data.
And what now? Knowing he was a Copy, what should he do?
A lady of languid mouth eyed him. Go that way again? He could feel the old stirring in his pants.
Was that why his Real Self -- the capitals seemed appropriate for the same reason one capitalizes God -- had run this sim? To be a voyeur?
Ruefully, he knew that this was altogether possible. Anger flared. Very well, then he would deliberately not.
He stalked off; the lady looked disappointed and a bit surprised. He wasn't following the script, obviously.
This majestic palace, he saw, was a reassuring copy, no more. Details were stitched in as processor time allowed. As he watched, bricks in a nearby wall muddied, lost their exact spacing. The room retreated into sterile, abstract planes: gray, black, oblongs where once had been walls and furniture. Background, mere background. And running on the cheap, too. He felt insulted.
He marched into the ballroom where whirling couples followed a quite convincing Strauss melody. He could hear every instrument.
He walked to the center of the room and shouted, "Stop!"
Surprisingly, everything did. The couples froze, quite literally. A still shot. No music, not a single sound.
Yet his own breath whooshed and wheezed in and out, air flow too abrupt. No intricate fluid codes need calculate any exact patterns, he knew; the appearance was enough to quiet his pseudo-nervous system, make it think he was breathing. In fact, it was breathing him.
"I want --" He stopped.
What did he want? To go back into the real world? That was impossible.
"Why . . . why did you make me?"
Silence. Of course, the same question, asked of God, would meet the same
silence.
His Original was letting him stew in his existential juices.
Termed variously Dittos, Duplicates or Copies, these simulations held a tenuous existence. Society had decisively rejected the Copy Fallacy: the belief that a digital Self was identical to the Original, and that an Original should feel that a Ditto itself somehow carried them forward into immortality.
Was his Original dead? That was a major reason simulations were made, after all. To give the dying some sense of continuation, however slim.
Copies conferred no immortality, of course.
Refuting the Copy Fallacy was straightforward, as an exercise in the calculus of logic, but a simple exercise made the point. Imagine yourself promised that you will be resurrected digitally, immediately after your death. Assign a price tag you will pay for that, insurance of a sort. Then imagine that well, perhaps it would not be started right away, but sometime in future . . . we promise. As that date receded, people's enthusiasm for paying for Self Copies dimmed -- demonstrating that it was the hope of continuity they unconsciously relished.
In the end, Copies benefitted themselves, not the dead.
So why was he here?
The frozen couples all seemed to stare at him.
Sent by Gregory Benford for posting on
Saturday, Janurary 10, 12 Noon EST
