Biblical (49 page)

Isn’t it an enormous coincidence that you just happen to be here to see it all, and not fur-wrapped and freezing through the Ice Age, or ridden by disease, oppression and superstition in the Middle Ages? No, you’re here now at the exact point in time when technology is advancing at a rate never before seen, a rate that is exponentially accelerating; the exact point in time immediately before our technology forces us to become either extinct or something more than human, something different.

There is a reason you are here, when you are here. The truth is that the Singularity has already happened. The Future you imagine has already taken place.

The Kardashev Scale establishes the major theoretical levels of civilizations. Your civilization doesn’t qualify for a score yet, but it will soon.

According to Kardashev, a Type One civilization has global government and resource management, total control of the planet, its
geology, its climate. It has all the energy it needs with no environmental cost or damage. The life of its citizens is greatly enhanced and extended, as is their intelligence.

A Type Two civilization has total control of its solar system and its citizens become so advanced it’s difficult to identify with them.

A Type Three civilization has total control of its galaxy. Type Three is so advanced that Clarke’s Third Law applies: its citizens have reached a level of self-generated evolution and intelligence that they seem omnipotent and omniscient. Indistinguishable from gods. And their technology is so advanced it is indistinguishable from magic.

The reality you occupy is on the verge of becoming a Type One civilization. The integration of nations into continental federations – like the European Union – is the first step to full global government; medicine, genetics, bioengineering, quantum physics, computing technology is accelerating exponentially; the Internet is the start of a Type One global information delivery and exchange system.

But that’s as far as we will be permitted to go.

The reason? We’re not a true civilization. Our soon-to-be Type One civilization is nothing more than an ancestor simulation being run by a Type Three civilization and you are no more than the technological ghost of a long-dead ancestor.

Things have started to happen. Visions of other times overlaid on your reality. The superposition of realities you have experienced is the universe, as you know it, shutting down; collapsing at the quantum level and causing time to fold in on itself.

Why is this happening? Because, as we approach Singularity, we have begun to create our own simulations and that cannot be allowed. We may be only one of a dozen – or a billion – simulations being run by the real, substrate reality. None of these can be allowed to develop their own simulations that, in turn, could create their own simulations. A simulacra non-proliferation rule, you could call it. Ironically, the Bostrom Hypothesis proved it to be a mathematical probability that this is a simulation, given that simulations and simulations-within-simulations must outnumber the single reality.
The only way the substrate reality can prove to itself that it is the one true reality is by not allowing simulations to run their own simulations. No recursion.

Transhumanists and especially the Simulists, who have made a religion of science, believe that it is our destiny to create simulations of our world, of ourselves. This is based on the logic that it is an essential part of our natures to simulate – from Paleolithic cavepaintings to books, theater and movies to hyper-real computer games, simulating reality has been a huge part of our intellectual output throughout history. Even science uses highly sophisticated computer simulations to predict future events in our universe and recreate past ones. On a low-tech level, we create theme-parks, visitor attractions and historical re-enactments.

But the Transhumanists and Simulists have gotten it wrong. We are not about to undergo the Singularity and create simulations of our past. We have been through the Singularity and this is the simulation. Or one of countless simulations running in some substrate reality by beings so advanced they can no longer be described as human. But however changed they are, however godlike, the basic human instinct to enquire, or curiosity, has endured and they built this simulation to resurrect their distant ancestors and see what life was like for them. And if you were some far-future posthuman, would it not be the immediately pre-Singularity experience that would fascinate most? That time of transition from humanity to posthumanity?

This shouldn’t be news to you – many have speculated about it throughout history: from Plato, Zeno of Elea and Descartes to Moravec and Bostrom. The nineteenth-century Russian Cosmist Nikolai Fyodorov predicted that we would eventually build what he called a ‘prosthetic’ society with technologically synthesized life that would be indistinguishable from real life. A simulation. He predicted we would be technologically capable of resurrecting the dead and making them immortal. He even speculated that the masters of the prosthetic world might be benevolent enough to offer their synthetic
people life after death – a second existence in some kind of eternal data storage. Maybe Heaven is in the Cloud, after all.

You could take this to mean that you are the distant ancestor of these superhuman-posthumans. Sadly, even that is not true. You are a replica of an ancestor in a simulation of the past. You are a theme-park attraction.

The civilization you live in is a replica. Ersatz. A history study.

Allow me to explain …

Macbeth realized he’d been reading for hours. On the other side of the windows, the sun was rising. Mora Ackerman lay on his couch, having slipped into sleep. He watched her, the gentle movement of her body as she breathed, and wondered if she truly dreamed within the sleep she seemed to sleep.

He closed the laptop and sat for a long time, thinking about what he had read. Astor’s arguments were irrefutable, but they were also unverifiable. Like the religions he so reviled, he asked his reader to put his or her trust in a single, far-fetched text. Was there enough there to justify Macbeth planting a bomb and destroying the project to which he had devoted four years of his life?

He thought of Casey, smashed and dead on a morgue slab in England. He thought of Bundy, the man he had just killed. He thought about the insanity of the visions the world had been tormented by and the chaos that had followed them. He thought back over a lifetime of depersonalization and derealization episodes where he had been utterly convinced of the falsity of his own existence and that of all around him.

Yet still he could not quite bring himself to believe Astor’s paranoid fantasy. What I need, he thought with weary irony as he rose slowly from his desk chair, is a burning bush or pillar of smoke or whatever kind of theophany posthuman gods go in for.

*

The thought had hardly formed when his apartment was filled with dazzling sunlight. The room – the furniture, the walls, the floor – all began to fade, to become translucent. Even Mora’s sleeping form on the couch became indistinct and glassy.

Macbeth again found himself suspended above a disappearing Copenhagen. But he could still feel the floor beneath him. He dropped to his hands and knees and scrabbled across his living room until he bumped his forehead against the coffee table he could no longer see. His hand fluttered desperately over the invisible surface until it closed around the strap of the rucksack. He held it before his face, ran his hands over its canvas surface. He could feel it, feel the bulk of its contents, but to his eyes his hands were empty.

“It’s still there …” he told himself. “It’s still real. I know it is.”

He looked down.

“Oh, Jesus …”

Beneath him, seen through the now invisible floors below him, the Earth crackled and boiled. He felt a wave of nausea surge up in his chest.

He closed his eyes tight, forcing his reason out of its dark corner hiding and demanding it take control. He breathed slow and deep. The sounds of the false world around him tugged and shoved at his resolve, but he focused hard on closing everything down, retreating into the fortress of his own mind.

“It’s not real,” he repeated. “It’s not real!”

Macbeth remembered how Astor had written that the hallucinations were as real as normal experience, it was a matter of which reality you were tuned into. The words seemed to taunt Macbeth as he used every neuron in his brain, every fiber of being, to tune into the reality he chose. He remembered what he had told Casey about Cosmo Rossellius, about how you could rebuild a reality as a memory space in your head. That’s what he had to do. He had to use his memory and focus.

He opened his eyes. Rising to his feet, he looked all around.
He existed, he realized, in two realities. For as far as he could see in every direction, he was surrounded by an alien planet that continuously cracked and boiled and fumed beneath a churning, nauseous sky – but he was looking at it as if through rippling glass. He could see his apartment and everything in it, but only as glassy, transparent forms, more rippling edges and shapes than solid. Enough, perhaps, for him to navigate by.

Macbeth realized that the other world he saw through the insubstantial glaze was one no human could survive in. It looked like every description he had ever read of Hell, but he knew that it wasn’t. This was Protoearth – the infant world just taking shape. The world before the Moon. Its mass, its rotation, its tilt, its dynamics – everything about this world was different. What he was looking into, through the window of his present, was a four-and-a-half-billion-year-distant past: a time before all of the coincidences and improbabilities that Astor had discussed had taken place to create a world capable of sustaining life long enough for it to evolve into complexity.

Macbeth also knew exactly what caused Protoearth to give birth to the Moon: the Theia Impact. A planet the size of Mars would hit the Protoearth and release one hundred million times the energy of the impact that had wiped out the dinosaurs.

That was what was going to happen. That was what the biggest – and final – hallucination was going to be. Gillman had been right: the beginning of the Earth was going to be the end of mankind.

The slate was being wiped clean.

Billions would die. Billions would stifle in the oxygenless atmosphere, would burn to death in the impossible heat, would be crushed by atmospheric and geologic forces – none of which would exist anywhere other than in their heads.

He had to stop Project One.

He looked again at the rucksack in his hands. He could see it, just, as if it had been carved out of ice and water.

He had to get to the University.

Every step he took was an exercise of the mind, as much as of the body. Macbeth had to constantly remind himself that he still inhabited the world he’d known. His apartment was still there, as was Copenhagen. Everything was all still there.

He stood in the middle of his apartment. He had to convince himself of that fact: second by second, he had to reaffirm the reality in which he stood, shutting out the burning, churning world that stretched out below him. The more he focused, the clearer the edges of the room, the furniture, the building became; but they never coalesced to anything more than translucent shapes.

It took him an age to navigate the stairs, not trusting his eyes and finding each step with uncertain feet while gripping tight the near-invisible handrail. At one point, when he had just cleared the second landing, the ground two stories below him bubbled and a huge jet of magma surged up towards him. He closed his eyes just before the molten rock enveloped him.

“It’s not real!” he yelled into the stairwell. “None of it is real!”

He felt no heat, no impact. He opened his eyes again and found the crystal edges of the steps were that little bit clearer, the glass from which the apartment building seemed to be constructed slightly more opaque, dulling the volcanic fury of the imagined world around it.

*

It was tougher out on the street. At ground level, he felt completely immersed in the illusion. Again he had to focus, to concentrate, as if rebuilding reality in his mind millisecond by millisecond.

Macbeth made his way through a landscape of churning crust and magma, beneath a sky of dense, bilious cloud, but he did so by following the soft-etched edges of the world he forced himself to believe he still inhabited. Larsens Plads appeared to him as a geometry of crystal, through which he could see the world glow, bubble and burst. He reached the Amalie Gardens: the crystal ghosts of the fountain, the carefully trimmed hedges and delicate flower beds superimposed on a writhing, belching world of fire and magma. He used the Amalienborg Palace, a huge, ornate ice sculpture in Hell, as a landmark to get his bearings. All the time he tried to concentrate his mind, to block out the tricks and deceptions it was playing on him. Copenhagen took form around him as glassy outlines in the lake of fire and magma. It was as if someone had overlaid one reality on another and Macbeth stayed focused on finding his way to the Institute.

Every now and then he would stop, close his eyes again and will himself back into the reality of his own world. Each time he reopened his eyes, the crystal world became clearer, the tumult of the Protoearth a little less vivid.

He reminded himself of his father’s words: Each mind is a universe unto itself: an independent cosmos of infinite complexity and inimitable uniqueness. Macbeth was determined to remain master of his own universe. He pushed on.

He thought through what he was going to do. It was impossible for him to destroy Project One simply by smashing the hardware. Only he and Dalgaard knew that Project One’s off-site backup was stored at DIKU, the Computer Science Department on the Nørre Campus. He would have to destroy that too, but it could wait. If he could damage the on-site facilities
enough, it would stop Project One functioning. Stop it thinking. Kill it.