The Immortals

Yesterday, I visited the Immortals. I abandoned my car at the periphery wall, no vehicles are allowed inside the Old City, lest immortality be cut short by accident. The narrow streets were packed with shuffling, cautious forms, cast into darkness by the overhanging extensions and expansions of the longevity hospitals, their needs for space long impossible to meet on the ground.

I met Enos at a sidewalk cafe-clinic, where he was undergoing a routine bloodscrub. Enos was my great-great-great-grandfather, and my sponsor among the Immortals. I leaned down and gave him a peck on the cheek. "How are you, Enos?"

"Well enough. My nanocyte count is down. Perhaps soon they will require replacement. These mechanical parts wear out so quickly." He peered at me suspiciously. Perhaps he did not remember who I was, or why I had come. I had arranged this appointment with his calendar, a time where he was free to talk, but not to leave.

"I've been thinking about what you've said, about what I'll want to do when I come here. I was thinking... art. Nothing big mind you, just some nice virtual landscapes. Exploring the aesthetics of simulated universes." When we had last met, Enos had given me this assignment. What do you want to do when you live forever?

"No, no good." Enos said, languidly waving a hand. "Even we Immortals find our art boring. Simulation spaces are toys, what happens when you grow bored and want to grow up? We have no such thing here."

"But I thought this was what you wanted, nothing big, nothing expensive, nothing that would shake the boat. My simulations are harmless." I said, perplexed.

"Harmless, but sign of else-where, else-whens. There is no else. When the Immortals made this city, they made a covenant with the lifers. Immortality would not be allowed to expanded, it would be to dangerous, would destroy the Earth. Immortality is too small for grand projects. All the time in the universe turns human ambition into dust. No, what you want to do is live. Do you understand what it means to live?"

Philosophy. I was on shaky ground, but I had to advance. "To live is to experience, to grow, the opposite of death. I want to survive forever, Enos, that why I came here."

He laughed, a thin sound from a man who conserved his body's strengths. "No, you still don't get it. What we do is exist. Life and death are two sides of the same coin, you cannot have one without the other. I walk, I eat, I see, I exchange pleasantries, but I do not experience in the same way you do, always changing and reacting. Each day is the same as before. Eventually, the sun will expand. I hope to be able to see it, but no more. As long as you want to live, you can never join us. Goodbye, and trouble us no more."

I left, back to the world, back to my hopes, and dreams, and ambitions, such as they were. All I wanted was to live forever, but that is impossible. Nothing that lives can be forever. I turned on my simulations, already they bored me. What a foolish idea, eternity with things such as these, I deleted them forever. We have one life, one brief, finite period in which to laugh and love and dance and live, and when we're gone, so is everything else. I will die, but until I do, every moment, every experience, will be unique. Not like Enos and his eternal sameness till the sun grows and the universe dies.

Yesterday I visited the Immortals.

Childhood in a Needle

The syringe lay on the table, glistening in the fluorescent lights of the clinic. “You know what this is, right?” Langdon asked. The doctor was tired, bags under his red-rimmed eyes, shoulders tense from too many arguments with the directors and the review board and his patient.

“Yes, GMBh neural replasticizer,” Mallory answered flatly. He sat opposite Langdon, draped in a teal hospital down with his arms hanging loosely by his sides. His sunken gaze scanned the small room methodically, taking in the light green walls, the lights, the two metal chairs, the flimsy folding table and the syringe. Every thirteen seconds he would start again, from top left to bottom right in smooth raster sweeps. He had been doing it ever since he had been admitted to the clinic.

“This may be the answer to your, ah condition,” Langdon said. “But the treatment is experimental. It will erase your memories, your skills, your personality. There is a very real possibility that your mind will never be restored. We are entering uncharted territory, and while I do not mean to be mystical, your soul is at stake!”

The doctor's dramatics left Mallory unmoved. “Do you seriously believe I value any part of my existence? I am an empty vessel. Once, I was a scientist, but then theories stopped making sense. I had a wife; she left me. My friends are fading from memory, we no longer have anything in common. The replasticizers are my second chance.” His dead eyes met the doctor's. “This is what I want.”

Langdon sighed, “I knew you would say that. I just wanted to offer you one last chance. Let's get this over with.” He stood up and walked around the table. He folded Mallory's ear back, placed the wavering tip of the needle against his skin. Closing his eyes, he drove the syringe home and pressed the plunger, injecting the neural replasticizers directly into Mallory's brain.

Mallory tensed in his chair, shook his head as the needle was withdrawn. “Tastes blue.” He muttered. His fingers felt like sausages, swollen with fluid. He lifted his hand to his face, turned it around and around as he marveled at the geometry of his palm. He wanted to tell Langdon what he was feeling, but he could not figure out how words worked. The doctor's concerned face melted into meaningless planes of color. His head fell back, and he looked directly into the light as half-blind eyes struggled to make sense of the word. The corners of the room stretched to infinity, Mallory's self dissolving into a million half-articulate possibilities.

Sunny Days at the Sea

Langdon watched the sky through half-slitted eyelids. The sun was warm on his face, his back rested comfortably in the cool lower layer of sand. The beach he lay on was empty and clean, devoid of the holidaymakers and cigarette butts and children and beer bottles and seagulls that despoiled the other Los Angeles beaches. The roar of the surf built in his ear and a gleaming white plane raced overhead, so close that Langdon felt he could reach out and touch its pregnant fuselage.

“Airbus A380,” Langdon whispered, “Korean Air flight 387, Los Angeles-Tokyo.” He followed the huge plane as it climbed, disappearing into the glare over the ocean. The swept crosses of airlines soared across the harsh blue Californian sky, their passage marked by the puffy lines of contrails. For Langdon, the contrails graphed the intricate dance that was LAX. Each day thousands of planes took off and landed, disgorging hundreds of thousands of passengers. Their bags wound their way through the bowels of luggage system, reuniting at the baggage claims before disappearing into taxis and shuttles and the cars of friends. Thinking of it all made Langdon dizzy, and he closed his eyes, floating into a blood red universe where the sound of the ocean ocean, the planes, and his heartbeat blended into a unending music. Time passed, and he thought about the airport.

“Hey kid, get up, get out of here. This is a restricted area.” A shadow fell over him, the dark shape of an airport security guard. The guard was short, pudgy, sweating through his khaki uniform despite the sea breeze. Holstered on his hip way the plastic module of a taser, a gray plastic mating of a television remote and a gun. Langon stood, brushing sand from his smooth hairless body. Proudly, he walked over the hot sand to his bike, which lay sideways on the plant covered dunes that fronted the beach. Under the eye of the guard, he got on and peddled unsteadily away, merging into the streets of Westchester.

Ballardian Short 1

The domes of the city rose from the desert, the steel worn to a dull luster by the endless scouring wind. Dust piled against the western curves, long sand dune arcs spilling off like ripples from a boulder placed in a stream. In the years since their construction, the domes had grown into the desert, their smoothed machined curves forming a organo-mechanic counterpart to the jagged basalt monoliths that marked the graves of ancient volcanoes.

Once, the city had been home to thousands, a thriving community of monastic scientists. Now, only Winston was left. He sat in a small pool of blue light in the empty darkness of the gathering hall, watching the feed from one of the tethered balloon cameras. The image swung with the wind, now facing north, now west, twisting with the cable. The cameras used to have servos, but the dust had gotten into the gears, and when he had tried to follow a dot on the horizon the camera had seized and frozen in place, becoming a victim of the wind. Winston was looking for Mallory. The other man had left the dome three days ago, saying that he was going to watch the sunrise.

That was one of the ways it happened, wandering off into the desert. Some of the scientists had fallen into silent reveries, others had leaped from the high catwalks or entombed themselves in hidden storage rooms. Many fled, terrified of the thing they couldn't understand. Their numbers had dwindled, the last few inhabitants scrubbing blood from the floor and moving their lost companions into the dry storage rooms. Some future explorer might find the city on day, find the rows of mummified seekers of truth next to the racks of canned fruit and soy protein cakes.

Winston was the last one left, Mallory was never coming back. Slowly, Winston eased his shrunken frame from the floor. He shambled through the complex, throwing open the doors. Where men had pondered the universe, lizards would scuttle from hole in the sideboards. Small oases would grow beneath dripping pipes as the automated systems sucked water from the air until they failed centuries from now. The endless dust would sweep in, and eventually the city would become one with the desert, one with infinity.

His final task done, Winston climbed the stairs to the top of the main dome. He stood on the observation platform, gripping the rail as he leaned into the wind. Mallory had been a fool. You could see the sunrise perfectly well from here.

David Darling: Equations of Eternity

Subtitle: "Speculations on Consciousness, Meaning, and the Mathematical Rules that Orchestrate the Cosmos." In my defense for checking it out of the library, the subtitle of Crick's Astonishing Hypothesis is "The Scientific Search for the Soul," and that was the publisher's fault.

It turns out, though, to be just as amusing as the subtitle would suggest. In particular, it contains the first serious exposition of the homunculus fallacy I've ever read:

Not least, the forebrain serves as the brain's "projection room," the place where sensory data is transformed and put on display for internal viewing. In our case, we are (or can be) actually aware of someone sitting in the projection room. But the fish's forebrain is so tiny that it surely possesses no such feeling of inner presence. There is merely the projection room itself, and a most primitive one at that.

This occurs, thankfully, on page 7; and it's a determined reader who's made it through manglings of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the word "evolve." But if you can stomach any more of this guy I'd bet the rest of the book is hilarious.

On a side note I don't know if the following argument makes any sense:

Say you have a perfect digital model of a finite universe containing conscious beings. Assume anything that appears random in our world (i.e. exact positions of subatomic particles) may be modeled as pseudorandom. So we have an extrinsically explicit representation of the world, but not identity; characteristics of one particle are represented by the states and relationships of many other particles. The way the data is organized, from our point of view as programmers, can't possibly make the difference between whether the simulated creatures are actually conscious or not. Either they are, and perhaps we should consider the ethics of writing murder mysteries, or they are not, and there is something very special about the most efficient form of information storage. Or our universe isn't finite and so we don't have to care.

Manna

An interesting short story by futurist Marshall Brain. It has implausibilities, it's really preachy in places, and I dislike most futurists as a rule, but I thought it was thought-provoking enough to be worth reading. Opinions are welcome.

BLIT : a short story

BLIT: a short story by David Langford

Terrifyingly relevant to what Mike and I are working on.

"2-6. This first example of the Berryman Logical Image Technique (hence the usual acronym BLIT) evolved from AI work at the Cambridge IV supercomputer facility, now discontinued. V.Berryman and C.M.Turner [3] hypothesized that pattern-recognition programs of sufficient complexity might be vulnerable to "Gödelian shock input" in the form of data incompatible with internal representation. Berryman went further and suggested that the existence of such a potential input was a logical necessity ...

... independently discovered by at least two late amateurs of computer graphics. The "Fractal Star" is generated by a relatively simple iterative procedure which determines whether any point in two-dimensional space (the complex field) does or does not belong to its domain. This algorithm is now classified."

What do you think the odds are that we make something like this?