The Emoticon Generation (25 page)

“‘Download the information,’ I told him.

“‘No.’

“‘Download the theories you’ve thought up, or your thousand-year-wait would all have been for nothing.’

“‘No.’

“‘If you don’t, I’ll turn this off again and turn it on in another thousand years. Is that what you want?’

“He looked at me, and slowly said, ‘How do I know that after I give you the information, you won’t tell the computer to age me another thousand years?’

“‘If you give me what you have, I will have had more than enough theories to establish superiority. No one will ever be able to surpass my achievements in such a short time. This is all that I need.’

“For five minutes he said nothing. His face didn’t move.”

“‘Fine,’ He finally said. ‘When this is over, you will erase the program and destoy your notes. No one else should go through what I had gone through. No one!’

“‘I will,’ I promised. ‘But only after I’ve gone over all the theories. If you’ve made mistakes on purpose, I will catch them, and I will turn you on again, a thousand years from now.

“He looked at me askance. He didn’t trust me. But he had no choice, and he knew it. ‘Fine. Downloading. Don’t worry, you won’t find a single mistake. Not one. But, I promise you, you will pay for what you did to me.’ I looked at him skeptically. ‘Arthur,’ he said. ‘This is Hell. I was crazy for more than a hundred years, and knowing that I couldn’t get out of this situation, that I couldn’t stop the program or kill myself if I wanted to, that drove me even crazier.’ He looked at me, and I have never heard me so serious. ‘No one should go through this punishment.’

“‘Trust me,’ I said, and I pressed the reset button. And he was gone.

“The plan had worked. But there was a catch.

“The plan was to publish at an ever-growing pace without a break for the rest of my life and beyond. But if I got myself Copied – the plan wouldn’t work. After a certain amount of time I would run out of material, and I obviously could not invent as fast on my own. I could certainly never repeat the experiment once I was
within
the computer, not without being easily discovered. So I would have to remain alive and unCopied, and keep on publishing the work of a thousand years in a single lifetime. That would be my legacy. My unsurpassed achievement would be etched in history.

“But then why not make it a bigger legacy?

“I looked at my watch. Less than thirty minutes have passed since the experiment had begun. And I have done in that time the work of a thousand years! A thousand years in less than thirty minutes! But achieving another thousand would be even greater. What’s another few minutes? But then why not another two thousand? Why not four? Why not more? The only thing that gave me pause was seeing my face, again, claiming to have suffered yet another thousand years in solitude. I knew I could coerce him to give me the information by threatening to leave him alone for another millenia – and I knew that he would have information, because he could no more stop thinking up new theories than you could stop breathing. Given another thousand years...

“And then I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted everything. I wanted to achieve what was impossible even for someone who did the impossible. My papers would be published for the next
thousands
of years after my death. No one would ever know how I did it, and everyone would wonder how one man could possibly have achieved what is, clearly, not humanly possible.

“Eternal fame, adulation, and awe stared me in the face, and I turned the program on again.

“‘Year?’ it asked.

“And one by one, I typed the numbers: One, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. One million.”

Jeneane Gold held her head in her hands. “Oh, no,” she whispered. “No, no.”

“But I didn’t press ‘ENTER’. My fingers hovered above it. If I pressed the button, my Copy would have lived a million years in complete solitude. If I didn’t, he wouldn’t have. That’s how I decided what to do. The fact that someone could live a million years in a millisecond because I pressed a button, the existence of a million years in that infinitesimal spark of electricity – it couldn’t be comprehended. It’s not real, I told myself. It can’t be real. My counterpart will
feel
as if he’s lived a million years – but he’ll
actually
have lived only a few seconds. It’s an illusion. He’s a program that’s only been activated now. He hasn’t lived anywhere. He hasn’t suffered any time. It wasn’t true.

“I pressed ‘ENTER’.

“My face appeared on the screen. And I know it wasn’t possible under the conditions of the program, which is supposed to keep the image ever young, but, for the life of me, I actually looked at a million-year-old face. Something in the features, in the face, in the despair. He was lying on the floor of his room, his eyes just staring ahead.”

“‘Give me your information,’ I told him.

“He didn’t react. He had to have heard me – it was, after all, a computer program.

“‘Arthur, give me the information.’

“Again, there was nothing.

“The man had been alone for a million years minus a thousand, and he couldn’t talk to the first person he had seen? After five minutes of trying to influence him, his eyes moved slightly, and they looked straight at me. Straight at me. What I saw, I... I will never forget. I had seen something in those eyes – so much misery – and in the second he had looked at me, those eyes delivered more information than the fastest computer. I was so scared, I immediately pressed the reset button. I had seen a million years of experience, Dr. Gold, of horror and misery, and ever since I have had nightmares about what I had seen in those eyes. Nightmares of his – of
my
– suffering. All because of me.

“I was breathing hard. I had to calm myself down. I am a collected man, Dr. Gold. I value this trait in myself. But what I saw in those eyes – it was a broken man. I don’t break easy, and I don’t break hard, either. But seeing me so broken – something snapped within me, the real me. At the time, though, I only knew that I had been frightened out of my wits.

“If I had been reasoning as I had until then, I would have told the computer to choose a different time – an earlier time, even, a few years this way or that, hoping to catch the Copy during a sane period and get the information that way. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do that to the Copy. No, that’s not true. I couldn’t do that to myself. This is the reason I live as I do, Dr. Gold. I can’t forget what I had done and how I had done it. A day does not go by that I do not contemplate...” He shut his eyes, shrinking at inner pain. A few seconds later, he opened them. “Nothing can make me forget, Dr. Gold. Not money, not physical pleasures – nothing. Nothing lessens the memory. Nothing lessens the pain. I cannot enjoy life anymore. But one thing keeps me going. The future. My memory, the legacy I will leave behind, the name I will have throughout eternity as the smartest man who had ever lived – that, to me, is worth everything. This is why I get up every day and check a few more theories. I did as I promised him when he was a thousand years old. I destroyed the hardware and the software. I did it without checking the accuracy of his theories first. Because I knew that whatever happened, I would not be able to turn him on again. I had destroyed the disk that contained the data of my Copy.

“I settled for a thousand years of my work, which, as I’ve said, would keep on getting published, once every two days, for about a hundred years after I die. No one would be able to surpass this. Even if someone did come up with the program I had come up with, they would make the program’s existence known, and so their accomplishment would be diminished, and lessened by the fact that I had had no such program to aid me.”

He paused to stare at the air. Then, nudged by an unseen impulse, he continued, “He said he would get his revenge on me. And I thought, the only way for him to do that is for him to insert a flaw into the theories and make
me
appear the fool. And so I’ve been sitting here for seventy years, searching for fallacies. But I see things differently now. He had said I wouldn’t find a flaw – and he knew what he was talking about. I never found one, single flaw in all his theories. But he didn’t say there was no flaw.

“I see now what happened. A hundred or two years after I had shut down the program after the hundred-year-session, he came up with the Bet-Gimmel Lemma. But I’m certain, now, that he did not restrict himself to theories that derived from it, as important as it is. That’s how, a hundred or so years after that, I’m equally certain, he discovered Andersson’s theories. He knew the Beta-Gimmel Lemma was flawed. But he also knew I’d never see the flaw. Because I would not trust him. If it took him so many years, what chance would I have when all my life would be invested in checking his theories and not in inventing new ones? And without looking up Andersson’s new avenue, I would never know the lemma was flawed. That’s why he never downloaded anything that came close to Andersson’s and your theories. That’s why everything that came afterwards relied on that lemma alone. He wanted to ruin me. He gave me a row of proofs, which he knew would eventually collapse. He knew that I wouldn’t get myself Copied to achieve immortality. My pursuit to outdo every man and woman, past or present – he had made sure that it would be taken away from me towards the end of my life or slightly afterwards. From inside the box, the computer program made sure that I’d waste my life, as I had made sure he’d waste his – all million years of it. He got his revenge on me. He has had his revenge. And what would I do now? Get myself Copied at
this
state?! I may still be the smartest man alive today – but I am not as smart as I had been. And I am certainly not as smart as the world believes me to be. I would live in shame forever, dwarfed by my own reputation. And, someday, a smarter man or woman would come and I would have to live with
that
shame, as well. No, I can’t do it. I can’t get myself Copied.

“He had ruined my life. Ruined it. The greatest human mind in history, and all my achievements, all my efforts have come to...” He trailed off. “Nothing... Nothing...”

Suddenly he looked at Dr. Gold, a spark in his dim eyes.

“I can get back at him. I can have
my
revenge.”

“What?! You don’t mean turning on your Copy again?!”

“No, no, I destroyed the Copy. I mean... There is something I’ve invented that does not rely on this lemma.”

He rose slowly from his couch, and shuffled to the room filled with papers. Presently, he emerged with a bound, yellowing notebook.

“Take this,” he said. “My Copy begged me to destroy this, but I couldn’t. All this time and I couldn’t. I have always justified it by telling myself that destroying it would be meaningless because I have a perfect memory. I remember the plans. But I’ve hidden them in a place no one but me would have ever found them. Perhaps it was an unconscious attempt on my part to achieve immortality on my own, because of my own achievements, and not because of his.

“You want it?”

Dr. Gold hesitated.

Prof. Bates waved it in front of her temptingly, urging her to take it. “Earlier you asked me why I did not share it. Well, here it is. The shortcut. The human brain as a non-recursive function. Go on, give it to humanity. They want eternal life, don’t they? They want to live forever, don’t they? That’s why they Copy themselves and live in cyberspace. Well, this is as eternal as it gets. Tell them: You want to live for a million years in a few seconds? You want to live for two million years? You want to live for more time than the universe has got? For twice that long? Ten times? A million times? A billion, trillion times that long? No problem, use this formula and you will. But if you do – you can’t change your mind. No matter what happens, you can’t take it back, you can’t stop in the middle, and you can’t leave.

“My Copy didn’t want anyone else to go through this. Well, I am sorry to have disappointed him.

“You want it?”

With a hesitant hand, Dr. Gold took the yellowing notebook. How could she not?

“I’m taking this because this is advancing human knowledge,” she told him. “But I’m telling them the rest of the story. I’m telling them that this is a curse.”

He smiled a sad smile again. “They won’t believe you. They’ll change the background and the scenery, make a billion things with which the people could interact, and then who will turn down immortality? But it will change nothing. The curse of living forever is that you live forever. Forever with no way out. Who can grasp that irony? No. No one will turn down immortality.” What little light remained in his eyes was suddenly snuffed, and behind them Dr. Jeneane Gold saw death. He would die today. He would kill himself as soon as she left.

Notebook in hand, she stood up and walked out, closing the door behind her. Somehow, his death no longer seemed a tragedy.

HER DESTINY

“A road diverged in the woods,” he whispered, standing over her grave. “And fate forced me to choose the one less traveled by.” His legs, rooted in the mud, sank a bit. Wind blew through his hair. “And fate,” he repeated softly, his voice cracking. “Forced me to choose the one less traveled by.”

~

He knew her before he met her.

Like so many things in his life: he just knew.

He’d always known he’d create something big. He’d known that whatever it was he would do, it would make him rich and famous. He’d known that eventually he’d be in league with Edison or Einstein.

He wasn’t good at inventing things, but he was good at making money. And he was near-prophetic at predicting where things would go. And so, at the age of twenty-three, he’d picked a direction and hit the gas. By twenty-five he was the CEO of Eternity Plus, a start-up that melded together different branches of sciences in a direction almost everyone thought was impossible. Its ultimate goal was to be able to copy people’s minds into computers, so they could live forever. And now, only five years later, thanks to his leadership and thanks to his choice of scientists, all the major breakthroughs were behind them. They just needed it to work. It hadn’t yet. Not without bugs. But it would. He knew it.

He knew.

He knew he’d be married, not
by
the age of thirty, but
at
the age of thirty: After he’d been around the block, after he’d experienced everything that was bad for him, after he’d have nothing more to regret not having done, after he’d had the crazy teenage energy drained out of him. He knew that only at the age of thirty he’d be mature enough to settle down. He knew it. And he knew that the second he’d be ready, he’d meet her. He knew she’d come to him.

He met her on his twenty-ninth birthday.

It was a one-in-a-billion lucky shot. It was a fluke. It should never have happened.

In the middle of his birthday party, at a friend’s studio apartment, he felt nauseous. He stepped out to take a breath of fresh air. And just as he walked out of the staircase and into the street, she walked into the building.

She wasn’t even supposed to be there. Her best friend had dragged her to Manhattan to celebrate her last day in the States. Of all the streets, they had a flat in this one. Of all the times for it to happen, one cellphone had broken down and the other’s batteries had run down. Of all the buildings in that street, she’d stepped into this one to ask for help, just as
he
was coming down the stairs.

He found himself face to face with the image he’d had in his mind since he was six years old.

He offered to help them with the flat but they didn’t have a spare. They used his cellphone to call for help. He stayed around until the help got there. They talked. They liked each other so much, that he ditched the party and left with them.

And the funny thing was, they were both called Tony.

~

There are things that are set. There are things that you know.

If they hadn’t met then, they would never have met. He’d never stepped outside New York. She’d always sworn she’d die before setting foot in it. She was on her way to London, to get a degree in the BBC School of Communications. Had she gone, she would have gone on to make a career as a producer in the BBC, and would never have come back. And they would never have met. Now that they had met, she took a job as senior associate producer at a local station.

If they hadn’t met on that day, at that second, they would never have met. He knew it.

~

There are things that you know. There are things that are set.

He knew exactly who he was. He knew what he would do five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now.

Now that he knew her, he knew who
she
was. He knew what she’d do five years from now. He knew what she’d do twenty years from now.

They’d set the wedding date on his thirtieth birthday. But two months before the wedding, she’d cancelled. It was a decision for life, and for a few horrible weeks she hesitated. He stayed with her. She stayed with him. They got over it, and set another date. It was set to be ten months after the original date – he would still be thirty years old. This time, he knew it would happen. And the future was easy to see again. Marriage, work, kids. Kindergarten, school, college. Five years, ten years, twenty years. The path ahead was clear.

Their future, in his mind, had already been written. He knew the future. He
knew
it.

~

And now, a month before the wedding, after he’d told her the great news, after he’d told her that a French production company was interested in coming over to the States in a few weeks and doing a documentary about Eternity Plus, after he’d convinced her to be interviewed as well, she stepped out of the house, into the car, and a truck ran into her.

Had she waited another second, it would have been fine. Had she come out a second earlier, the other driver would have seen her. Had Tony told her only one more thing that morning, none of this would have happened.

It was a one-in-a-billion chance. It was a fluke. It should never have happened.

And now she was gone. And his life was gone. And he didn’t know anything.

~

Some of the mourners approached him, wanting to console, to share their memories of her. He answered curtly.

Matt Sanders, the company’s CTO, was one of the last to come and share his condolences. Tony stopped him, gripped the man’s arm forcefully, and took him aside, towards his car.

“Matt,” Tony said once they were alone. “Tell me you got her!”

Without looking up, Matt said: “No. I’m sorry.”

“But ... I thought you had everything in place. You said you got all her data from her brain.”

“Yes, well, Tony, we did.”

“Then what?”

“We turned her on,” Matt looked at him with helpless, puppy-dog eyes. “We
did
get everything from her brain – her personality, everything – into the computer. But ... It was the last ten seconds of her life, Tony. She was dying. Her brain was practically gone. And ... Every time we turned her on, she just ... died. Again. And again. And again.”

“Is there ... Can’t you ...” Tony’s eyes were glazing over.

“Tony. We can only work with what we
have
. Her brain was dying. So we recorded a dying brain. If we’d gotten there an hour earlier ...” They both knew there had been no time. The accident had been too severe, and she’d lost too much blood. Tony called Matt from the ambulance, frantic, knowing that these were her last moments, desperate to keep even a remnant of her alive. Nothing could have been done faster. “We recorded a dying brain,” Matt repeated. “So we have her dying. Even if our technology worked ten times better, we’d still only be able to work with what there is.”

Tony’s strength suddenly left him. “Yeah. Okay. I’m sorry.”

Matt looked at him. “Yah. Do you need anything?”

“No. Thank you.” Tony opened the car door. “Thank you for everything.”

Matt looked at him with empathy. “Sure,” he said at length, then turned away.

Matt made his way as quickly as possible to his own car, wanting to get away, wanting to just go home. As he reached it, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

It was Tony.

“I want to see them,” Tony said.

“What?”

“The last ten seconds. I want to see them.”

“What? No. You don’t want to see that –”

“I want to see what she saw, I want to see how she saw, I – I – I just want to – Just bring it over to my house, okay?”

“Tony ...”

“Tomorrow. Do it tomorrow,” and a spark of the strength that had so often marked the entrepreneur returned.

Matt relented, unable to face the man’s sorrow. “Yeah, sure, okay.” And he fell back into the car and into the driver’s seat.

“Thanks. No. Tonight, bring it tonight.”

Matt looked at Tony for a long time, then nodded, and quickly turned away and left.

~

When Matt came over that night, he brought two tapes.

“What’s the difference?” Tony asked.

“Well ... They both show the last ten seconds of her life. This one,” he raised one tape, “is actually what you asked for. The computer simulated the way her mind really works. It did the math from one fraction of a second to the next fraction of a second, from one moment to the next. Just like real life goes from one moment to the next.”

“Okay. And the other one?”

“See, I figured ... I don’t know ... I had this thought. I mean, this is Tony. It was worth doing something stupid for her.”

“What?”

“I used ... the method we’re working on for long-term.”

“I thought that was for people who wanted to live in a computer for a period of years in a few seconds. Even thousands of years.”

“Yes.”

“What does that have to do with Tony? She only has ten seconds.”

“I figured, I don’t know, you know, the way the computer figures the brain using the other method is the way the computer figures where the moon will be in five years. You punch in a few numbers, and it tells you where the moon will be in five years without having gone through the middle. It’s the same here, you punch in the years, and you get a person who’s lived in a computer for a thousand years in a single second. So ... I figured, we don’t have to type in a
thousand
years. Instead of skipping a year into the future, let’s do the opposite.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I mean, let’s break it down into frames, like a movie. I mean, a movie is made up of frozen frames. But you when run twenty-four-or-whatever frames a second, it looks like real life.”

“So?”

“So ... When we compute the brain using the first method, we compute fifty states-of-mind a second. So let’s compute the first fiftieth of a second using the second computation. And then the second fiftieth, and the third, and so on. I mean, it’s different math, maybe it’ll give different results. I mean, we still don’t know if the damned thing –”

“Fine. And ... ?”

“Same thing. Exactly. Frame for frame. Our computations must be right, because –”

“So you have two tapes which show the same ten seconds?”

“Yeah. Done different ways. I figured you wouldn’t take my word for it that they were the sa –”

“Yeah, okay.” Tony took the tapes from Matt’s hands and looked at them. “I just play them?”

“Yeah.”

For a long time, he just stared at the tapes. Then he looked up at Matt and handed him one.

“Put it in.”

Matt put it in. Tony took the remote, and the both of them sat on the sofa and watched.

These were Tony’s last seconds, seen from her point of view, garnered from her brain, seen exactly as she had seen them.

Tony recognized the small hospital room, as seen from her eyes. There was another bed beside hers, with another patient. A curtain. From the corner of her view, you could see part of her leg, covered by a blanket, and a couple of her fingers. And sitting right in front of her was Tony, as he was then, his face sad and broken, holding her hand.

The breathing got harder. Tony’s face – his own face – became frantic. He looked around, about to call a doctor. She made a small sound, then gasped. The vision got blurry, and then the screen turned dark.

“Oh, my god ...” Tony said, looking at the blackness. “Oh, my god ...”

And they just sat there in silence.

Until: “Put the other tape in.”

“Tony. You don’t want to see this again. It’s –”

“Put it in!” Tony thrust the tape into Matt’s lap, clearly unable to get up himself and put it in.

Matt lowered his head, took a deep breath, got up, replaced the tape, sat back down again, and pressed ‘Play’.

The two watched the same ten seconds in silence.

Tony then took the remote. He rewound it, then pressed ‘Play’ again.

And when the screen turned dark, he played it again.

After the fifth time, the remote fell from his hand. “Okay,” he said.

“Is her family here?”

“No, her brother’s in Australia. They’re not ... They’re not on friendly ... He didn’t want to come. And both her parents are dead.”

“Do you ...” he looked around. The huge house felt so empty and dark. And Tony, sitting there in the couch, seemed to have shrunk. “Do you have anyone staying with you? Anyone who could ... ?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Maybe I should stay. Just a bit, just till –”

“I don’t need anyone, but thank you.” He stood up and reached out to shake Matt’s hand. “Thank you for everything you’ve done.”

“No ... No problem. It’s just that ... I’m so sorry. I know how much you two –”

“Yah,” Tony killed Matt’s sentence with a word. “Thank you.” And he said it in a way that clearly meant ‘get out’.

“Sure,” and Matt bent down to take the tapes.

“Leave them.”

Matt’s hand froze an inch from the tapes. His back still bent, he looked up. “What?”

“Leave the tapes.”

Matt looked into Tony’s eyes for two seconds, then turned and left.

There were twenty-nine days left till their wedding day.

~

Tony didn’t come to the office for a week.

The people from Eternity called Tony every so often, but mostly left him alone. Surely he had friends in his own life, friends he could depend on during these tough times.

After a week, he appeared, went immediately into the office and shut the door behind him.

After a few hours, Matt walked to the door, opened it gingerly, and stepped in.

“Good,” Tony said, before Matt shut the door behind him. “I was just coming to see you.”

Matt shut the door, and looked at Tony. “How are you doing?”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Two things. I got this invitation to a general meeting of the shareholders of the company. You probably have one on your desk, too. ‘On the agenda: The Chairman’s term of office.’”

“I saw that. It’s outrageous! They’d
fire
you?! And when you’re grieving over –”

“No, no. They sent it the day before she – Look, it doesn’t matter, it’s bogus. They want results and that’s how they’re pressuring me. The point is, try to get results as soon as possible. The heat’s going to get worse over the next few months. But don’t skip over – Do a good job, okay? Don’t worry about the business side of things. I’ll take care of it. But I’m counting on you to take care of everything else for the next few weeks.”