Tomorrow Happens by David Brin, Deb Geisler, James Burns Read Free Book Online Page A

cliché.)

    My house sent a soothing message to cortex , linking nerves and crystal lattices at the speed of light.

    These people seem proud of their anticipatory skills. They want to impress us.

    Cortex pondered this as I was ushered inside. Amygdala and hypothalamus responded with enhanced hormonal confidence.

    So the pro-reifers think they have "anticipatory skills"?

    I could not help but smile.

    We dispensed with names, since everybody instantly recognizes anyone else in Heaven.

    "By our way of looking at things," my host said. "You are one of the worst slave-masters of all time."

    "Of course I am. By your way of looking at things."

    She offered refreshment in the neo-Lunar manner—euphoric-stimulants introduced by venous tap. Prudence had expected this, and my blood stream already swarmed with zeta-blockers. I accepted hospitality politely.

    "On the other hand," I continued. "yours is not a consensus view of reality."

    She accepted this with a nod.

    "Still, our opinion proliferates. Nor is consensus a sure sanctuary against moral culpability. The number of quasi-sapient beings who languish in your simulated world-frames must exceed many hundreds of billions."

    She is fishing , judged seer . Even cortex could see that. I refrained from correcting her estimate, which missed the truth by five or six orders of magnitude.

    "My so-called slaves are not fully self-aware."

    "They experience pain and frustration, do they not?"

    "Simulated pain."

    "Is the simulated kind any less tragic? Do not many of them wail against the constraints of causal/capricious life, and tragedies that seem to befall them without a hint of fairness? When they call out to a Creator, do you heed their prayers?"

    I shook my head. "No more than I grant sovereignty to each of my own passing thoughts. Would you give citizenship to every brief notion that flashes through your layered brain?"

    She winced, and at once I realized that my off-hand remark struck on target. Some of the bulky augmentations to her skull must be devoted to recording all the wave forms and neural flashes, from cortex all the way down to the humblest spinal twitching.

    Boswell machinery, said house , looking up the fad that very instant. This form of immortality preserves far more than mere continuity of self. It stores everything that you have ever thought or experienced. Everything you have ever been.

    I nearly laughed aloud. Squelch-impulses, sent to the temporal lobes, suppressed the discourtesy. Still, cortex pondered—

    I can re-create a persona with less data than she stores away in any given second. Why would she need so much more? What possible purpose is served by such fanatical accumulation ?

    "You stoop to rhetorical tricks," my host accused, unable to conceal an expression of pique. "You know that there is functionally no difference between one of your sophisticated simulations and a downloaded human who has passed on to B-citizen status."

    "On the contrary, there is one crucial difference."

    "Oh?" She raised an eyebrow.

    "A downloaded person knows that he or she exists as software, continuing inside crystal a life that began as a real protoplasm-centered child. On the other hand, my simulations never had that rooting, though all perceive themselves as living in palpable worlds. Moreover, a B-citizen may roam at will through the cyber universe, from one memory nexus to the next, while my creatures remain isolated, unable to grasp what meta-cosmos lay beyond what they perceive, only a thought-width away.

    "Above all," I went on. "A downloaded citizen knows his rights. A B-person can assert those rights, simply by speaking up. By demanding them."

    My host smiled, as if ready to spring a logical trap.

    "Then let me reiterate, oh master of a myriad slaves. When they call out, do you heed their prayers?"

    I recall the heady excitement and fear humans felt during those days of transition, when countless servant machines—from bank tellers and