Tom Easton Silicon Karma

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know
I'm not just good software. If they ask what to call me, I put "INGRID'
on the screen, all caps, like an acronym. If I say anything that isn't
business--you know, "Ready to dock,' "Insertion achieved'--they ignore me.
When they do talk to me, it's just the way you used to pat the dashboard of
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our car and coax it to make it just a few more miles to the
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gas station."
He laughed aloud at the memory, and then he had it. He had just arrived.
Bertha had taken him to that too-cute restaurant, where Rose had been with
Marvin, though he had not yet recognized her then. And Marvin had explained
how both he and Bertha could be the same person. Yet he had also said ... "I
thought only the computer could do that. Run two bodies, I mean. There isn't
enough processing power for his guests to do it."
Ingrid nodded. "But he runs his extra bodies with just one consciousness. That
gets complicated, much more than simulating separate persons, each with its
own body. He told me once, it's an exponential relationship. And a dopple has
its own consciousness. Plus it often runs in a separate machine."
"But how do you do it?"
She shook a finger at him. "You forget, we're just computer files now.
So all we have to do is copy. You can edit out those parts of you that aren't
needed for a job--impatience, distractibility, other interests--and merge in
other people's skill files. And ..." She grinned broadly. "It's the only way
to work." # Michael Durgov stood before the window, staring into darkness.
Night had seemed to come so fast here.
Surely it had still been morning when they left the lake. It could not now be
later than mid-afternoon. Yet a crescent moon was glowing in a blackened
heaven as devoid of sky-glow as if the virtual world had never heard of
shopping districts or neon or sodium-vapor streetlights. But then the
computer's guests, virtual ghosts, had little need to shop;
they could have whatever they wished for no more effort than it took to think
of it. The only streetlights were small affairs, squarish glass boxes on metal
posts, each one housing a wavering flame not much brighter than a table lamp.
Buildings loomed in black-on-black silhouette, windows gleamed with orange,
flickered with movement. Was it really just an image, as Ingrid had suggested?
Tentatively, trying to think of his mind as a muscular organ able to affect
directly the world beyond his skull, smiling as he remembered that he had no
skull, that for him no real world existed any longer, that his mind was
embedded in, a part of, the very world he wished to move, he urged the view to
change, to be of tropic beaches, flowering jungles, daylight. He grinned when
it wavered, stuttered, flickered obediently from choice to choice, settling on
a steep mountainside high above a trio of soaring eagles. What did it mean to
wonder what the
"real" view was beyond this window? There was a gap just above the sill;
through it came the smells of salt and green, warm breezes, chilling gusts, as
well as the sounds of waves, chattering monkeys, screeching birds. When he
flexed his mental muscles once more, he saw night again, and town. Real enough
then, the underlying "reality" to which it all came back, the "ground" the
computer imagined for all to share. The mountainsides and beaches and jungles
he could see in the window were mere images, no thicker than the glass--or the
image of glass--before his nose, as if it were a TV screen, albeit one with
scent and sound as well. And so, of course, was this. He sighed, perplexed. It
should be light outside. Did time flow differently here? Was there some
equivalent of time zones?
If so, and if the virtual world had any correspondence to the real, meat world
he had left behind, he was a long, long way from the lake and
Rose. And what of space? Back in the meat world, he had seen the computer that
held all this, and it was no bigger than a file cabinet.
His own late-model office PC, inlaid in the surface of his desk, had
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held a career's worth of files, databases that were the equivalent of a
hundred encyclopedias, the abilities to read papers laid flat upon its
surface, to take voice input and answer the phone, and more. It had beggared
the computers of his youth, when IBM had been a logo to reckon with. So the
virtual world occupied a machine of truly immense capacity.
Yet that machine had been small, much smaller than a world, smaller even than
this room. How could it contain so much?
He shook his head. He knew the answer. But his grasp on the
concept--Image!--was hardly intuitive. A world could also be contained in a
reel of film or spool of videotape, but that was not the same thing at all, at [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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