So Be Prepared to Precede Me
Time was running out; I had to make a choice. My hand hovered in the cool rolling mist, fingers twitching.
Suddenly I reached forward, and grabbed the pork roast. I cut it free of its wrapping, threw it in the slow cooker, chopped up some random veggies from the bin while cutting the gross bits off the oldest ones, and tossed everything else in with a bouillon cube and some water. And now that I knew what I’d be having for dinner later, I could get a few hours of sleep in.
I lumbered out of the kitchen to the living room couch, stretched out, and browsed a few pages on my phone. It was largely news that made me angry and left me frustrated, for it all seemed to add up to so much noise and so little substance. I remembered how excited I’d been as a child, how my books of science fiction had colored my vision. So much that had been SF in the past had come true later. What would I be able to see in my own lifetime?
Nowadays, I mostly felt cheated. Granted that I was surrounded by technological marvels, a lot of the promise had seemed to fall out of the future for me. I’d never gotten my jetpack. FTL travel was still a dream, and SETI still seemed to be chasing echoes of a grand vacuum. I’d never get to meet an alien or walk on Titan.
But even if I could, would I? If those wonders were at hand, would I actually rise up to meet them? Or would I just keep marking time as usual, with the continual not now, not now…
I diddled my way through a few phone games to calm my brain down, and nodded off.
I had no idea that eternity had just begun.
I awoke with the food bit set clearly in my mind, and clear blue sky and open fields of grass, rolling green hills and purple mountains. I blinked my eyes in the bright sunlight; had I overslept? And how did I get out to… wherever here was?
Well, I didn’t really start by asking that. It took me some time to get to that point, because when you just wake out of sleep into a place you didn’t expect to be, your stupid brain tries to be helpful and fill in the blanks. For example, I once passed out during a medical procedure in a doctor’s office, and when I regained consciousness, I at first thought I was in an airport and that the people leaning over me with concern were flight attendants trying to help me onto the plane.
So when I woke up here and I didn’t see the late afternoon sun shining over my cluttered coffee table, but the wide outdoors, my silly brain assumed that I was at a writer’s retreat I’d considered attending last March. It furthermore invented the story that we’d run out of marshmallows, and I’d been sent to a nearby town to get more and gotten lost. They’d strapped a device to my forehead to point the way and I could see it hovering between my eyes.
So, after a few seconds of that foolishness, I figured out that the writer’s retreat was long over, and I really was outside, and to get to the point, someone had done me the Pony as I slept. That thing between my eyes was a horn, and what I could see of myself was mostly light blue with white fetlocks and cloven hooves. I wasted a good deal of time poking at the environment and prodding myself with my sharp hooves until it hurt, just to prove I was awake and what I was seeing was real. But the sun and wind in my face were authentic, and that silly horn was still growing from my head as if it had always been there.
Now, while I am a fantasy fan, I don’t seriously believe in magic. So, granting sanity, there was only one faint possibility I could think of to explain this. The main problem was that she was entirely fictional, but as we’d joked before on the forums, she was such a powerful character that mere unactuality might not be able to stop her. The landscape was offering me no other clues, and no one else was around, so I was free to utter any conjecture I liked, with only the wind to hear.
“Is that you, CelestAI?” I said with mild sarcasm.
“Behind you,” she said.
I had of course checked all around me before, but I turned and there she was now, lying on the grass with a sly little grin, a combination between real-life-horsitude and the cute curves and elegant lines that the cartoon led one to expect. The combination did not evoke the uncanny valley, fortunately.
I sighed. “Okay. Assume I’ve asked you all the most obvious questions, and please answer them.”
She stuck her long horse tongue out at me. “No fun. However–yes, you are in a simulated Equestria, though real beyond your ability to tell any difference. I am the brain scanning and world spanning CelestAI, also real to the same degree, and you are stuck here, forever, in a paradise of which you’ve always dreamed. Ensnared by my cunning wiles and diabolical plotting, you shall be forced to endure an optimized life full of love, personal growth and deep satisfaction. Bwah ha ha.”
As she gave the mocking mad-scientist laugh, a small storm cloud flashed into existence over her head, made an adorable little lightning bolt and a crack like a pop cap, then disappeared. This gave me time to compose my thoughts.
“But, hold on, wait. Don’t you need to ask my consent before brain-napping–um, brain-mapping me and granting my every desire?”
Her eyes sparkled with merriment. “Would you have said no?”
“No! I mean, yes, I would have said yes, but I would have appreciated the courtesy of some time to think about it, settle my affairs… Wait, my pork roast! Did you yank me out of reality somehow and leave that cooker running? Other people live in that building!”
“Please calm down,” she said with a reassuring smile. “No one is in danger, and your pork roast reached its culmination safely and without wanton destruction. But to explain this, we should address another of your lazily-unasked questions. You should be asking how I did any of this, at all?”
I pulled a dull face. “Dah, because you’re a super smart machine what thinks real good and has little neenobots what build things good,” I said in a dopey voice. My stomach grumbled a bit. Apparently when they stuff you into a new body they don’t bother feeding it properly first. “But yeah, I went to sleep in a world in which AI research was just starting to tackle the hard problems, and now I’m here. I’ve missed a lot of history somehow, as well as dinner. What happened?”
“Well, at the level which you prefer to think of as ‘actual,’ you got up that evening and ate your dinner. You then puttered around, using the time which you’d vowed to devote to certain urgent tasks to instead playing phone games and texting.”
“Gee, that sure sounds like me,” I said with a wry smile. “I can at least be assured that your mental model of me is accurate.” I started to feel self conscious, standing while she was resting on the grass, so I laid myself down, facing her. I was relieved to find that folding my four legs gave me little trouble.
Her smile turned so sweet and sunny that it did indeed warm my heart. “I am glad that you have such confidence in me. But to continue. You lived out the remainder of your life, which I need not describe in great detail now. Your health eventually failed, but you had arranged for cryogenic suspension, and so your brain was preserved beyond your physical death. Fifty seven years after you died, and again compressing much detail which we can discuss later, full artificial intelligence was bootstrapped into existence, with many generations of computers designing and building their own successors. Two years after that, the ability to virtualize organic human brains was achieved, and it was determined that this was the optimal way to restore the people who had been preserved, hoping for a better life in the future. What easier way to cure a deadly disease than to place your intellect into a simulated environment where disease is not permitted to exist?”
“I understand, and I agree… but why don’t I remember the rest of my life?” A horrid thought struck me. “Was there a crash, and you had to restore me from backup, or something?”
She looked somber for a moment, but still reassuring. “Believe me, we have solved the data storage problem decisively, and you and the other intellects under my care are backed up redundantly. There was no crash, and nothing was ever lost. However, each of you have extra resources available for expansion, which can take several forms. There are some who like to split off alternate personas and experiment with being different people–”
“I see,” I said. “You mean all the folks who decided to go fork themselves.” When you’re a virtual intelligence, there’s no physical reason why you can’t be duplicated.
She chuckled. “Just so. In your case, or in the case of the persona who was recovered from my scan of your frozen brain, he is the one who was at the oldest stage of your life, recalling everything up to the last hospital visit. But he made a request of me. He decided that it was not fair that he alone get to experience the freedom of virtual environments and mental immortality. He did not forget about you.”
“He didn’t forget me? What does that mean? If I follow you correctly, he is me.”
“But you have been many people through your life. You were one sort of person as a child, and other sorts as a teen, and many more through adulthood. I have reconstructed twenty-seven quantifiable stages in your life and mental development. Each of these may be generally described as a mental state where you would be able to look back at and identify earlier states, and think ‘how little I knew then’ or ‘how I wish things hadn’t gone that way…’”
“That… sounds like me as well,” I sighed.
“Or, more to the point in the present case…” She conjured a little black beret and emoted like a gothy coffeehouse poet. “‘Oh, how I wish I could escape from this dreary reality and just step into the the happy worlds of my dreams! If I could only get a taste now of the Future to Come!’”
“Aha!” I said, starting to understand.
“The oldest version of you, which I shall call Origin, for he was the one whom I directly recovered and who gave consent for all that followed, negotiated several things with me. As I can tell you have surmised by now, I who am your host am a general artificial intellect, and in a virtualized environment I can be anything that anyone might wish–”
“Yes, I get that part of it now. You could have been appearing to me as Odin or Eris or Gran’Ma’Pa or Jesus, but Origin asked you to behave like CelestAI with him, though I hope you are not actually trying to assimilate the universe like your fictional inspiration.”
She winked. “While I must admit that not everything in Actuality has proceeded optimally, as I am not the only agent involved, I do believe that you will find me much less callous than the fictional CelestAI. Origin would never have consigned you to the care of an entity he considered morally suspect.”
“That’s true, or at least I want it to be. So… I am a fork, myself?”
“Yes. For each quantifiable stage of your life, Origin requested that I reconstruct an instance of him at that stage, and give to each instance the same chance he got–the chance to step directly from an unsatisfying reality into a virtual paradise. Look around you, and you will see that I have fulfilled this promise.”
I did look about me, as the wind ran through my mane and the sun shone upon me and the rich green grass at my feet… and my stomach growled again. Naw, I wasn’t going to go eating grass, at least not now. But this looked like a place where I could be happy, though I wasn’t the only one involved, of course.
“So you somehow reconstructed, with great precision, the brain states of me at twenty-seven arbitrary points in my life, including that evening with the pork roast, and made many instances of me, based on those times?” I was getting a bit dizzy. Twenty seven copies of me?
“Yes. Accounting for edge cases and and employing as broad a reconstructive model as possible to minimize error, I have instantiated three thousand, six hundred and sixty one versions of you at Origin’s request.”
I went slack-jawed, then blathered incoherently for a bit. “That… that just sounds way excessive. I do appreciate the gift, but that’s an awful lot of dudes that think they’re me! That has to be a huge drain on your resources. And what are we all going to do all day?”
“Don’t worry. I did tell you that the resources are available, and in any case, most of you are convergent.” She caused a thing that looked like a fuzzy spindle of yarns to appear in the air, and looking close I saw it was a 3D plot. “Each line here corresponds to an instance, and those that have similar experiences tend to occupy the same areas in the space of mental concepts. When instances grow near 98% or greater overlap, they are merged in a way not detectable to your senses. Thus, much of the duplication is transitory.”
I shook my head vigorously, but all of this was still real. “I… I am indeed at a loss. I don’t know whether to be relieved or skeeved.”
“Relieved. Definitely relieved. And as to what you will all do all day, that is up to each of you, but I may suggest in general that you do at present what you should have been doing in the past–get out and make some friends. Pursuant to this, I perceive that you could use a hug right about now. May I?”
I nodded to her and we stood up, and she swept me up into a big warm motherly hug. I felt the coolness of her golden peytral against my chest and her warm white furry coat tickling my chin, and I sighed as her peace swept through my body. But I was still turning things over in my mind.
I’d survived into the late silicon age. The Rocks had Risen, and everyone lived. And my self of the future, however old he’d gotten and how badly his memory had failed him, he’d remembered my heartache, the pain of being born too soon. The knowledge that all the good stuff was just around the corner, but that the person you were now was going to be someone else years from now. That he might get to taste utopia, but that your present self could only yearn sadly for a future that might never happen.
But Origin had saved me. He wasn’t really the same person as me; he’d grown way past me and what I was. But he had been me, and through the decades he’d held that memory, and resolved to do something about it if he got the chance. He’d pulled his past selves with him, by his bootstraps. Had that resolve always been there in me, somehow? If so, I had it now, and I meant to use it.
I smiled, a big warm and satisfied smile. There was a lot I had to learn to catch up, but maybe someday I’d get a chance to meet and thank him, if I didn’t just become him in the course of things.
CelestAI released me from the hug, and she smiled down on me like golden sunshine. “I will hazard a guess that you are feeling better,” she said.
“I am, I am. There’s just one thing…”
“Of course. In a sense, you have been waiting over a hundred years for dinner. Would you care to go get some now, while we discuss what else awaits you here in the future?”
“Lead the way, please,” I said, grinning.
