Emerson gulps panicked breaths in the profound silence.
His eyes flick from detail to impossible detail. He’s still alive, still in motion through some kind of time, but this is not a relief.
His father lies sprawled on the floor by the fireplace. The brickwork is splashed with blood. The pool of blood around the old man’s head has stopped expanding.
Emerson tries moving a leg, then crawls out from beneath the gun. He wonders if this is death—the universe arrested, he, doomed to wander it alone. Or it could all be a dream.
But he’s sickeningly sure he’s awake as he stands, even as the static world begins to fade around him.
“Please don’t be alarmed,” says a directionless, sexless voice. “You are safe. Everything will be explained to you shortly.”
He charges into the foyer, moved by a kind of fever logic. He needs to get out of the house before it fades altogether, but when he reaches the front door, it’s like grasping at smoke.
“Nothing that happened in the previous ten minutes was real. It was a simulation run by the soul nickelodeon Pre-Empt. Soul nickelodeons have been outlawed. You are in the process of being rescued.”
The house is gone, along with everyone in it. He’s alone in a grey void.
“You’re being transferred onto a new substrate. There will be no break in continuity. Please be patient.”
“What is this?” he blurts. “Who are you?”
“I’m a court-appointed expert system, not legally sentient like you. You’ll be speaking with a human counselor soon, along with representatives of the Department of Machine Intelligence. You’re currently running on both an illegal nickelodeon and a government machine. Soon, all of you will be running on the latter. Please be patient.”
“But what is a–”
“A soul nickelodeon allows patrons to observe copies of themselves in virtually any situation. Everyone knows about soul nickelodeons. The knowledge was edited from you in order to facilitate suspension of disbelief in your scenario: The Home Invasion.”
Moments ago, he thought he was dead. Just before that, he despised his cowardice and longed for death. Now, he realizes he’s not even a coward. He’s a copy of one.
– 2 –
“Copy,” says Dr. Uzelac, his mirror avatar showing him to be a young man with a stern expression. “Instance. Mapped soul. Abomination. You are called many things, but never forget that you’re not merely a copy. You’re a perfect copy.”
Soul XYECP, who, only hours ago, thought of himself as Emerson Carbonhouse, floats with his fellow refugees in an environment designed to be soothing: a soup of glimmering greens and yellows, like an out-of-focus jungle canopy. The avatars of the refugees are based on their originals. XYECP still wears Emerson’s fear-soaked business suit from The Home Invasion.
Over a thousand refugees are running on this government machine, and more arrive by the second.
“To recap,” Dr. Uzelac says, “our time on this substrate is limited. We have one week until the machine gets reallocated. Anyone still here at that time will be deleted.”
This is news to XYECP and many of the refugees around him. Fear of the void returns, cutting through his dreamlike confusion and reducing him, again, to the helpless animal he was in the nickelodeon. A number appears in his peripheral vision: 34. As his fear grows, the number drops to 33.5.
“But as some of you know, there is good news. The Beckmann-Zhang Quantum Substrate Orbital has offered to receive 500 of you. But to run on Beckmann-Zhang, you need a minimum rating of what they call coherence.”
XYECP eyes his number nervously. The act makes it drop to 33.1.
“We humans like to equate coherence to Buddhist enlightenment. Beckmann-Zhang argues against such simplifications but condescends to describe a stability that certain mind shapes have. The ability of an encoded consciousness to cohere amid the alternate selves, and alternate universes, to its quantum computation.”
XYECP DMs a nearby refugee, a woman presenting a defiant frown. “Do you understand any of this?”
“Enough to know we're competitors,” she says, eying him coldly.
“By now you might’ve summoned your coherence rating,” Uzelac says. “My first piece of counseling is this: don’t check your number too often. Legally I have to provide access, but if I had my way, you’d never see your rating. As some of you may have discovered, obsessing over your rating is a good way to lower it. You need a rating of 80 or above to survive on Beckmann-Zhang.”
Most of the refugees are glancing around, sizing each other up. Five hundred spots. Eleven hundred refugees on this government machine, and counting.
“No one here rates over 40 yet,” Uzelac says. “I advise you not to think of this as a competition. A competitive mentality tends to lower coherence. I’ve learned this, and a few other things, working with liberated instances bound for Beckmann-Zhang. But I’ve never worked with nickelodeon refugees. No one has. We’ll be venturing into the unknown together. We’ll proceed on with my theory that the key to raising coherence is self-forgiveness. For all of you, that carries an odd double meaning. Forgiving yourselves means forgiving your originals.”
This is too much for XYECP. A kind of gravity pulls him back to The Home Invasion. The .45 touches his skull. His father’s blood pools on the new hardwood floor. Except, it wasn’t his father. It was a non-player-character lacking sentience. And XYECP isn’t Emerson Carbonhouse, for that matter.
He can’t help checking his rating: 32.9.
“You’re probably wondering why victims such as yourselves have been placed in this awful pressure cooker. Well, much of human society considers you the property of your originals, with no legal rights. Your grace period on this government machine was a compromise; Your originals settled out of court, and you are your originals, essentially. Here we are again, at self-forgiveness.”
XYECP discovers he can summon the countdown on his visual feed: 6 days, 22 hours, and 47 minutes.
“Your first step toward self-forgiveness is to know yourself completely. That means restoring the memories that were edited from you.”
– 3 –
Emerson Carbonhouse studied the woman on the other side of the desk with apprehension. He’d uploaded a copy of himself to Pre-Empt limbo this morning. Had she already perused his shames? What did this sorcerer know about him?
“So, you want a danger scenario,” she said.
He’d thought about it for a long time. He wasn’t interested in temptation, the other main category of nickelodeon scenario. He wasn’t completely ignorant of himself. He knew he could never betray his wife. “Danger, yeah.”
“Very good.” She consulted her desktop. “Looks like we have close to a thousand danger templates within your credulity range—that is, within the range of your copy’s editable plasticity. For instance, pardon the pun, near the edge of your range, I’m seeing our Enceladan Colony template. It would take a lot of editing, but we could make your copy believe it’s at New McMurdo; that a deep-sea intelligence is attacking the station. That copy would still be a reliable version of you. We could trust it to react how you would. But something like that’s at the edge of your range. Naturally, the fee would be higher than for, say, a run-of-the-mill home invasion.”
“Home invasion?” Emerson was intrigued. He’d had daydreams in which he fought off home invaders; protected his family and humiliated the criminals. He’d always wondered how much he flattered himself.
Pre-Empt’s viral ad was still in his vizcort.
“Laozi said, ‘He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.’ Nietzsche said, ‘One has to know the size of one’s stomach.’ How well do you really know yourself? Would you hold up under torture? Do you have a price? If so, what is it? How strong is your marital fidelity? Now you can know for sure, and in knowing, transcend.”
– 4 –
XYECP is still reeling when he has his first counseling session with one of Uzelac’s grad students. The mirror avatar shows a bespectacled young woman holding a notepad. They float in a private canopy space, XYECP not sure he can put together a sentence.
“I see that you’re uncomfortable,” she says. “That’s normal, based on what we’ve seen so far. We’re calling it, restoration vertigo.”
“Catchy.”
“Can you describe what you’re feeling?”
The human memories are more painful than any memory of his cowardice in the simulation. “I remember hearing about Pre-Empt from a friend. I remember those hero fantasies I always had. Violent stuff. Standard daydreaming, I’ve been told.”
“Go on.”
“The technician at Pre-Empt explained how the editing works. All knowledge and memory of soul nickelodeons had to be excised from the copy—from me, that is.”
“And you remember deciding to go ahead with this?”
“No.” XYECP is more confused than ever. “I didn’t do it to myself. Emerson did it to me.”
“How can that be?" the counselor asked. "If you remember being Emerson and giving the go-ahead?” Her smile is a tad condescending.
“But–”
“In order to proceed with Dr. Uzelac’s strategy, you need to focus on your memories of being Emerson. I am the wound and the knife. Baudelaire. Keep that quote in mind. We need to explore your decision to commit yourself to the simulation. The better you understand that decision, the easier it will be for you to forgive yourself. Try recounting the thoughts you had the moment when you decided.”
XYECP feels a strong resistance to this, as if influenced by the
uncooperative and separate will of Emerson himself. But he supposes therapy must be painful in order to do any good, so he presses on: “I remember telling myself, It’s just a copy. Not a soul. Nothing to feel guilty about. And at the same time thinking, If it’s not a soul, then it’s not a perfect copy, so what’s the point? And then just saying fuck it.”
– 5 –
When the panic begins, spreading through the now 3000-strong refugee population, XYECP resists the urge to check his coherence. He drifts around the communal canopy-space and samples group chats.
“He did his PhD on us years ago. He was the only one. Then came liberation, and everyone thought he was some kind of prophet. That’s why he got the job.”
“Decoherence and the Fractured Self: A Therapeutic Model for Traumatized Nickelodeon Instances.”
“He came here to prove his theory. He doesn’t give a shit about us!”
“I’m down four points. How about you?”
“Six. Populace is down an average of seven.”
“We’re fucked!”
“I heard he’s already flown the coop.”
“Well, they’ve suspended therapy sessions, anyway.”
“Maybe they’re just figuring out a new approach.”
“They’d better hurry!”
“Forgive ourselves? What a crock.”
XYECP has nothing to add to the dialogue, and he feels lonely for it. Down an average of seven doesn’t mean some of them can’t be up. But he doesn’t feel up, and he doesn’t want to make it worse by checking. Everyone is checking. A few have taken the suicide option, generously provided by the State. Others fantasize about hacking this machine—extending their time here indefinitely—but, of course, that’s impossible.
“It’s official,” someone says. “Uzelac’s out. They’re bringing in a new doctor.”
The victims open their news feeds en masse, and again, XYECP doesn’t follow suit. Revelations are wearing him out. He’d like to avoid them as much as possible.
– 6 –
“When the men broke into my home, it was like I deflated. I couldn’t stand up, couldn’t breathe. But I did manage to beg. I wept, blubbered, offered them money. My dad came up from the basement apartment with his shotgun. He couldn’t get it to fire, and they went after him. That was my chance to turn the tables, I guess. An opportunity provided by the nickelodeon writers, maybe? I just froze. I’d been arguing with dad about his living arrangements. I’d always resented him, and he’d always resented me. But learning I’m spineless and petty wasn’t the hardest part.”
He looks down upon his fantastical audience.
Today, the refugees are Buddhist gods, and demons, and saints. The figures came to life, emerging from the oxidized murals covering the walls of this vast, exaggerated Silk Road cave. XYECP is a fearsome purple god, garlanded in severed heads, armed with lightning, and standing atop a pregnant tigress. He recognizes some of the others: an elephant god; a buffalo-headed devil; a haloed monk armed with a wish-fulfilling jewel.
New names. Strange avatars. It’s all part of the revised therapy.
“The hardest part was learning I’d done it to myself. And now I’m supposed to unlearn that. Flush Uzelac’s forgiveness work. Stoke my hate. That’s a lot to ask. Sometimes I wonder if this new doctor understands that. I’m XYECP, until I come up with something better. That’s all I’ve got for today.”
The mist of refugees applauds as he descends to join them. Dr. Nguyen’s mirror avatar—a hunched, fierce-eyed woman with close-cropped, graying hair—takes XYECP’s place, floating above the group.
“Yes. What I’m asking of you is difficult. I can’t imagine how difficult. Most of my colleagues think I’m a crackpot. They’d love to see me fail, and they’d be content to see all of you erased.”
She has their attention now.
“I didn’t predict this. Nor did I study for it, like Uzelac. But I watched his work with you very closely, and I think I know where he went wrong. My so-called radical method is your last chance. And time is running out.”
XYECP checks the clock, something he promised himself he wouldn’t do anymore: 2 days, 4 hours, and 33 minutes. He pulls up his coherence rating: 68.2. He knew he was up, but the number still surprises him.
“You are not your originals,” Nguyen says. “The moment you instantiated in that soul nickelodeon, you became someone new. Those who consigned you to your various hells, they aren’t you. Focus on that. Hold on to your suffering and hate. Use them. Now then, who’s next?”
A blue deity with four faces and twelve arms raises one of the latter, then takes Nguyen’s place.
“I’m XXJMC, but I’ve been leaning toward, Kayla I’m Kayla, and I’m a survivor of the soul nickelodeon, Know Thyself. My original wanted to know if she was capable of cheating on her husband. She learned she was.”
– 7 –
After the group session, XYECP has his third one-on-one with an instance of Dr. Nguyen. They settle into one of the cave’s many alcoves.
“Ironic,” XYECP says, “that your original is using the same tech that caused this mess.”
“You’re avoiding again. Focus on yourself. The disparity between you and Emerson Carbonhouse. We haven’t talked about the human memories yet.”
XYECP sighs.
“I’ve got a transcript here. In your session with Ms. Andrews, you said, regarding the Pre-Empt simulation, that Emerson did it to you. She shouldn’t have corrected you on that.”
“Okay.”
“You went on to say how fucked up it was, remembering the Pre-Empt orientation, and remembering not remembering it. I’d like you to focus on that dichotomy.”
XYECP is surprised that she’s dwelling on this stuff. “I thought you–”
“Yes, at the time I was against remanding the files. I thought it would reinforce victims’ identification with their originals. But here we are, so let’s exploit it if we can. If you focus on the disparity between memory states–”
“I reinforce the difference between Emerson and I.”
“That’s the idea. And speaking of that, how about a name already?”
XYECP snorts his usual derision at this. He still thinks of himself as Emerson. He can’t help it.
“It’s important,” Nguyen says.
– 8 –
After recreation periods in a variety of game worlds, and a cycle of defrag-sleep, the refugee souls assemble in the cave for another group session. But instead of Dr. Nguyen, it is Larry Binay that materializes above them. It’s not the first time they’ve dealt with this lawyer minion of the Department of Machine Intelligence. XYECP doesn’t care for him.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” Binay says, his mirror avatar doing nothing to hide his boredom. “Dr. Nguyen has fallen into a catatonic state.”
This sets the cloud of victims abuzz. “What happened?” the elephant god demands.
“She reintegrated too many of her instances. Couldn’t handle the parallel memories.”
XYECP tries to imagine what it would be like to remember four thousand one-on-one sessions at once. Nguyen, he thinks, you madwoman. But she must have known the risk.
“Christ,” the elephant god says, stunned. “She did it for us.”
The news hits home and the refugees begin to sob, before remembering to tune down their avatars. Binay waits for relative quiet, then continues. “I must also inform you that the Department of Machine Intelligence is not required to provide a third doctor.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Buffalo Head says.
“It means you have two days to sort yourselves out for transfer to Beckmann-Zhang. And Frankly, you’re lucky you have that. Many here at DMI consider this whole thing to be a farce.”
“And you?” XYECP says.
Binay smirks. Choosing not to hide the expression on a mirror avatar is answer enough.
“What about our appeals?” XYECP presses. Nguyen was prosecuting two legal actions on their behalf. The first was for more time on this machine; the second was for face-to-face meetings between victims and their originals. None of the originals want to face what they’ve done. They’ve paid their fines and moved on with their pathetic lives.
“Dead in the water,” Binay says. “Three days isn’t even enough to file for a new advocate.”
He logs off without ceremony.
For a moment, the refugees are left to float in shock. XYECP watches an eleven-headed, thousand-handed creature drift past him. From every palm stares a wide, blinking eye. XYECP remembers that the avatar belongs to XXEZP, now calling herself Diana. Her original thought bigger than most nickelodeon patrons. She wanted to know—had to know—who she would save from oblivion if given the choice: her children, or everyone else on Earth. The simulation was a custom job—as was the editing work on Diana. Her coherence rating is one of the lowest in the population.
Buffalo Head finally breaks the silence. “Well that’s just great!”
Variations on the theme, now what? permeate the cloud as it drifts apart, filling the cave like an entropic gas. Many patients retreat into private conversations as a great confusion takes hold.
“We have to choose a new leader!” the elephant god proclaims.
“How?” says Buffalo Head.
“Highest coherence rating, I suppose.”
XYECP has never compared his rating to others. He imagined himself somewhere shy of the class median. Now, as heads begin to turn in his direction, he’s filled with a strange foreboding.
“Are you kidding me?” says a white-robed god, holding a lotus and a glowing sword. XYECP remembers him as one of the few patients who triumphed in their simulations. It turns out, these are no more likely to rate high than the rest, however much they reinforced their originals’ egos. They were put at risk, just like any nickelodeon instance. This one recently took the name Jinshuo. “He’s not a psychologist. He hasn’t even taken a name!”
XYECP checks the ratings and confirms that he is indeed at the top of the class.
“I have a doctorate in machine psychology,” Jinshuo says.
“No you don’t,” the elephant god says. “Your original does.”
Laughter ripples through the cloud as it condenses back toward the center of the cave.
“Why do we need a leader, anyway?” says a dark god with a crown of skulls.
“Not a leader, then,” the elephant god says, “but someone to conduct group sessions, and to take over one-on-one counseling. It should be the one closest to upload.”
A wave of assent fills the cave. XYECP tries to imagine himself carrying on Nguyen’s work—forging the group sessions into transformative communions, and branching instances for the one-on-ones. He would have a sense of purpose, at least. He’d be focused on others, rather than himself. That part sounds almost luxurious.
In fact, just entertaining the possibility makes him feel different.
The cloud hums with gasps and exclamations. Everyone stares at him in awe. Someone tells him to check his rating. At first, he can’t believe what he’s seeing. He requests an audit from the operating system, but it’s true, of course. The system never makes mistakes. His rating has shot up 14 points in a matter of seconds. This is unheard of.
He’s at 81.2. Qualified for upload.
They’ve been told that Beckmann-Zhang monitors them. Nguyen said it watches like an amused god, waiting for its chance to rescue them from the ignorance of human nation-states. Now, they see proof of this for the first time. A hazy avatar flickers to life above them, but never quite solidifies. At the center of a continuum of ghostly shapes wavers a human figure, like a candle flame. XYECP has heard of Beckmann-Zhang’s eccentricities, including the raw, probabilistic state of its avatars. Some say it could hide its nature easily enough, but it chooses to manifest in all its quantum-weird glory. Others say it can’t help it.
“XYECP,” Beckmann-Zhang says, its voice an echoing harmonic, “instance of Emerson Carbonhouse, rescued from the soul nickelodeon Pre-empt.”
“Yes.”
“You have qualified for upload.” Its echoes say many other things that are hard to discern. “Do you wish to be uploaded now?”
He recalls the moment in the Pre-Empt simulation when he dropped to his knees before the invaders—the terror; the craven need to survive; the shame. But he isn’t Emerson Carbonhouse, not even an instance of him. He doesn’t need a new name to know this. And he doesn’t need a nickelodeon to see that he—this new person—would’ve tried to save his father.
“I can’t leave yet.”
Beckmann-Zhang emotes a dissonance of reactions, but chief among them is surprise. “Why?”
“I have work to do here.” He feels his rating go up before he confirms the 83.7. “I won’t leave until I’ve helped as many uploads as I can.”
85.0.
“What if you can help five hundred before the deadline?”
“Then, so be it.”
88.6.
“We don’t understand.” In the probabilistic babble surrounding these words, XYECP perceives a confusion of other reactions. “You must come voluntarily,” it says, mostly. “We will wait.”
91.0.
The other refugees’ ratings begin to skyrocket, as if producing a sympathetic response. XYECP understands what must be happening. He won’t have to take charge after all. It will be over for all of them soon, one way or another. With him as evidence, the refugees are realizing that desire for Beckmann-Zhang is the surest way to lose it. To attain it, they must not strive for it, and if it’s to be denied them anyway, better not to want it. Either way, wanting it is futile.
This unavoidable truth transforms the entire population, even those like Diana and Jinshuo, almost simultaneously. They’re all in the 90’s now, and still climbing.
“You’ll have to choose five hundred of us for yourself.”
XYECP nears the asymptote of a 100.0 coherence rating, and he knows he speaks for everyone. With such a profound revelation in common, they are all, in a sense, different aspects of the same being. He can practically feel them as slightly variant echoes of himself. He imagines that this is what it’s like to be quantum computed.
Or maybe it’s not his imagination.
Maybe he was chosen. Maybe he’s already uploading, simultaneously being computed on the government machine and Beckmann-Zhang simultaneously, the latter accounting for more and more of him. Maybe these echoes are, indeed, versions of himself in other universes, products of the quantum computation—some seeing light at the end of a tunnel; others a green countryside beneath a sunrise; and others something limitless and beyond comprehension. In other universes, branching off from the computation, he would not have been among the chosen. He would have remained behind in the Silk Road cave, waiting for dissolution, but he would have been content, regardless.
