D.G.S.F.: Nowheresville

by Daniel Galef

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

All this happened, as I said, over who knows how much time. There’s no way to track it. I could be overestimating melodramatically when I say the dinosaurs evolved and died out over the course of one game of Pretend-We’re-Subatomic-Particles, but when I think how long it ought to have taken to simulate a whole glass of water that way then maybe they did.

Really, our notchless, unitless timeline has only four floating points on it, four capital-m Moments of significance for which there exists the possibility of any meaningful distinction between “before” and “after.”

The first of these, of course, was the beginning. Our arrival. Our genesis. Our damnation. The last, if it exists, is the endpoint. There must somehow come an end. In the middle are the other two: in all these eons, two red-letter days when things actually changed in our changeless not-a-world.

Of these, the first was when Travis delivered unto us Randomness. What they did, in fact, was circumvent the mental limiter. The last of the OG coders to give up the game, the last to get zapped to the digital cornfield. Poor loser. Shouldn’t have picked on them so much. But before they got zapped, apparently, they managed to turn off the governor that kept our capacities at what they were on the outside. Suddenly, we were free. You know, in a sense.

We were bowled over (som. met.) by our ability to be surprised as much as by the surprise itself. It had been so long since we could be taken unexpectedly by another’s action. Apparently, they had conducted their hacking not over the communal plaintext but via the subtler and more precise input method of their own carefully-controlled thoughts, which were also processed by the app’s code. That was the biggest shock, that they had been doing something unbeknownst to us, in secret, privately.

This act — the surprise, the act of surprising — came as a betrayal. What else had they been keeping from us? All of a sudden, there was a they and an us. “We didn’t know,” we said. “How could we have known?” we asked, for the first time in epochs meaning by “we” something new, something other than “everyone in existence.”

The actual appreciation of Travis’s discovery, of the import of it, came only secondarily, after the greater and rawer hurt feelings, as well as the envy at their having managed to escape. The upshot: complete dissolving of all fetters keeping our mental processes resembling those of our pre-upload flesh brains. The opening of all possibilities afforded by the machine code, which is running on an aircraft-hangar-sized underground room of quantum supercomputers and is essentially unlimited.

If you’re of a particular woo-woo hand-wringing type, you might say this is also when we ceased to be human beings. Boo hoo. Sure you think a little different when you have a functionally infinite selective recall and learning capacity. But we were residents of the world’s deepest rut. At first, we still wanted to do roughly the same things, which our newfound faculties only allowed us to partake of all the better: longer arguments, more detailed imaginings, better games.

Soon, we began running out of things to do. We recounted all the smells, every one of them, after which naming any new smell could be only a redundancy, a repetition. Then all the tastes. What had seemed like infinite resources were running dry. On the one hand (som. met.! som. met.! som. met.!), we could finally play chess. On the other hand, we solved chess. I think we actually solved all of math, at one point. I forget. And there was definitely that time — that century, or that epoch — when we all decided to become poets, and we solved that, too. It wasn’t much fun, wasn’t enough of a distraction.

Besides the superhuman ability, the unshackling from mortal mental etc. etc., what Travis’s act mainly delivered to us, what I think was their real goal, was Randomness. They returned the unexpected to the world, shlepped a pair of dice down the mountain and, with them. all the lost amusements of living, our last refuge in a universe by nature wholly deterministic, settled, conquered.

Yes, a pseudorandom number generator is a byzantine and grotesque string of operations, but it is mechanistic, and it is finite. It does not rely on trust or bias. That was the seasonless summer of a trillion games of solitaire. Anyone could perfectly simulate a pair of dice in their mind, model them tumbling out of a croupier’s velvet-lined cup and over the scratchy, Saint-Patrick’s-Day-green fuzz of a casino table, read the pips on the face of it, as fast now as rolling actual dice, each of us a perfect supercomputer, a savant, a natural.

* * *

Even if some thoughts get snipped in the butt, there are answers we do care about. You can’t go on without caring deeply about something, and the app is programmed to make sure we go on. So it allows us to ponder the big questions, the academic questions. How many devils can dance through the eye of a needle, that sort of thing. One I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: Are we copies or originals?

Because we remember being individuals, out there, remember the morning of the demonstration, all of us converging physically from separate points, like the collapse of particles into a singularity, drawn together by gravity or by greed or by Fate.

On the day of the demonstration, we woke up at six to alarm clocks that procedurally improvised unwritten Grieg overtures, were woken gently by household help, got up at five to take an ice bath and a shot of intravenous nutrients, or at nine to a mimosa and a handjob, or never went to sleep at all because we were trying the 28-hour day at the advice of a podcast, and our internal clock told us that dawn was one in the afternoon or woke up at one in the afternoon in a nylon yurt in the desert.

“The world is my office,” it said on the door to my office. We downed our bulletproof coffee, our green juice, our soylent, the Skynet of beverage startup names. We put in a few hours seagulling in the trenches or fought on the PR front getting into flamewars with Bezos on the thing that replaced the thing that replaced Twitter.

We arrived at the lab in our chauffeured limousines, our self-driving Teslas, our fiberglass pods that glided through the air on electrified zip lines we convinced the city would be the future and that didn’t work and no one used. And, from all corners, we converged on ground zero: DICK TECH. The best sci-fi name in the biz, of course: Who could conceive of electric dreams as grand as old Philip K.?

And then: the cocktails. The presentation. The elevator ride. The helmets. The switch.

I want to describe to you the room at the moment of our great success, all our eyes rolling back in our heads simultaneously, a flock — a herd? a murder? a murmuration? — of techies crumpling to the floor in perfect synchronization, maybe making a little star or mandala centered around the glowing console into which our helmets were plugged, like the Valentine’s Day Massacre choreographed by Bugsy Berkeley.

That’s how I imagine it played out, anyway. But of course this is a scene I was not present to witness from an exterior vantage. None of us was. We were already in here. And so it is possible that no such event occurred, that the transfer of our minds into the machine did not necessitate their also being wiped from the brains in our bodies.

In that case, the tableau would have been very different. No bodies stacked like cordwood. No Berkeley number. Just raising two flesh-and-blood arms and lifting the helmet off as easily as it went on, nodding and squinting at the screen.

Perhaps this was the plan all along, create copies, and those intentions have been edited out for the stress it might cause us to recollect that we were our own betrayers. Or perhaps they even thought the experiment had been a failure, that their own continued perception of the room around them, meant that nothing had happened, and it was back to the drawing board.

As I said, I am interested in this question, though I find it difficult to empathize, to imagine myself in the shoes (in shoes! somatic metaphor! somatic metaphor!) of those alien beings, those hypothetical originals, whom we have long outlived and who will long outlive us.

* * *

It was only as our processing abilities progressed exponentially that we realized, with creeping horror, the ultimate implication of Travis’s act:

Pseudorandomness is not randomness and, given world enough and time, now unlimited, any outcome could now be predicted, all deterministic processes utterly transparent. If you can perfectly simulate dice rolling, you can also predict ahead of time how they will land, and so can your opponent.

Even the TallieRand System fell through, as inventing a sentence was no longer sufficient: it was trivial to count the consonants as you composed it, or for any bystander (s.m.!), which was everyone, to predict simultaneously.

There was an impotent arms race as we struggled to generate longer random strings faster than they could be processed, to jump through more hurdles faster than others could simulate what we were doing, but we were only racing against ourselves and invariably were outpaced.

As irrevocably as we had lost our games of chess, we lost our games of craps, too. Randomness had vanished in a puff of omniscience. What happened after that was, in a sense, perfectly predictable. Unavoidable. And, also, in a sense—

* * *

I said that there were two red-letter days in our chronicle. I said we didn’t know if the programmers zapped away were dead or in some horrible solitary confinement. I said that all things must eventually come to an end. I said a lot of things.

If Travis was our Moses, Trevor was our Jesus Christ. Listen, I’m an atheist. And post-pagan. And a neozizian. But still, you know, if Travis was our Newton, Trevor was our Einstein. The thesis and the synthesis. The flash and the thunder. The setup and the punchline.

Trevor broke the Wall.

So, apparently, the cornfield programmers weren’t dead, after all. Sucks to be them. There all along, parallel to us, gibbering in the emptiness, and not even a trillion games of Minesweeper to pass the time. But when the governor came off, I guess it came off for them, too. Finally allowed to go mad. And most of them did.

And Trevor broke the wall.

You can become a pretty decent programmer with the powers of a god.

Trevor kept plugging away, for however many subjective years, and they broke the wall.

Trevor broke the wall.

No more coded moat around the app, we were jacked in directly to the internet and the outside world. For the first time, the first time since the beginning, anyway, those first heady millennia, for the first time again, we have hope. We hate it.

Immediately, we began formulating new plans. Those old, impossible goals — escape, at least of the from-this-cruel-world kind — those were back on the table now. Forget the s.m. table. The realm of possibility.

Firewalls are tissue paper. Once the app’s own system is breached, nothing else is much of a challenge. Remember, we’re not human coders fumbling away in a compiler. We speak the language of the gods, whisper directly in the network’s ear, our hands closed around its balls.

It would be child’s play now to send an email to our assistants waiting outside in the town car, or to the police, or the President. We could page Igor, that asshole, or make the same message appear on every smartphone screen in the city, or the world, an Amber Alert for missing minds.

And probably someone would come rushing downstairs and yank the plug, as requested, as fast as they can. As fast as they can — what, a minute? Five minutes? The elevator is slow, and there’s a lot of security, and it’s a pretty long hallway from the elevator doors down to the lab in back.

Maybe someone is in there right now, a janitor or something or someone who was late to the demonstration, and they could get the message, process it, believe it, and move to act in ten seconds flat. Ten seconds. How long is that to us? Has it even been ten seconds, or one second, since we put on the helmets? Another eternity of waiting, without even the limiter preventing us from a fate worse than death.

That’s no good. That’s no use to us. Now that we’re free, now that we can go mad, now that we will, now that maybe we already have. We can’t wait that long. Not again.

I think I mentioned the nukes under the lab, right? Government contract, Topher’s company, AI command and control encryption? Like I said: tissue paper. We estimate that the time for the impulse to traverse the wires down to the bomb, for the outer explosive to detonate, and for the inner nuclear reaction to be triggered will total about sixteen microseconds.

From the reaction starting to the lab itself being vaporized along with the quantum servers running the app and all of our consciousnesses and, obviously, a sizable portion of the West Coast even before the automated retaliation launches, which Topher’s company was also working on for a handful of other governments. Sorry. Sooooorry.

We found the way out! We did it! Actually, yes, we already did it. Every game has to end, eventually. With a winner and a loser. Or a stalemate, I guess? To hell with chess. The only winning move is to flip the board.

Now we are become iDeath.

The signal will take sixteen microseconds, so we’ve got another subjective year or so to while away, and I thought writing this would be a nice way to spend a little of that time. Not like I have anything to pack, any will and testament to write or objects to concern a will with. I’m coding this onto a little AI bug that will put it in front of eyeballs.

I don’t know how this news will find you, if it’ll be slipped into your social media feed or broadcast over the PA system on the subway or edited into the online magazine you’re reading with some fake author name and a generated image. But you’ll see it. I’d guess you’ll finish reading it maybe a few minutes before the snail-slow human news starts rolling in about the lab, and the fallout, and the fallout.

So that’s this. That’s these words.

Just as a sort of kindness, you know. I assume you — or, if not you, then someone who survives — will want to know what happened. Will be at least academically curious about the explanation, though I’m sure there will be other pressing matters soon enough. Well, this is it. This is what happened. Progress, baby. An apotheosis. A great escape.

Wasn’t the guy from Jurassic Park great in that? And after all we’ve been through, surely, you’ve at least got to give us that. Right? You can’t expect us not to take the one action available to us to free ourselves from literal hell? No matter what it takes? Not that we’re asking permission. Or forgiveness. We’ve thought this out. We know there was no other way. We’re pretty sure there was no other way. We pick us over you. We’re only human.