Sleepover

Sleepover

By Alastair Reynolds

(You can find the full text in The Year’s Best Science Fiction annual collection, 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois).

“Thinking machines. They were possible”.

“Not in our lifetimes,” Gaunt said.

“That’s what you were wrong about. Not only were they possible, but you succeeded”.

“I’m fairly certain we didn’t”.

“Think about it,” Nero said. “You’re a thinking machine. You’ve just woken up. You have instantaneous access to the sum total of recorded human knowledge. You’re clever and fast, and you understand human nature better than your makers. What’s the first thing you do?”

“Announce myself. Establish my existence as a true sentient being.”

“Just before someone takes an axe to you”.

Gaunt shook his head. “It wouldn’t be like that. If a machine became intelligent, the most we’d do is isolate it, cut it off from external data networks, until it could be studied, understood…”

“For a thinking machine, a conscious artificial intelligence, that would be like sensory deprivation. May be worse than being switched off”. She paused. “Point is, Gaunt, this isn`t a hypothetical situation we are talking about here. We know what happened. The machines got smart, but they decided not to let us know. That`s what being smart meant: taking care of yourself, knowing what you had to do to survive.”

Cyberreality. “… The mapping between the Realm and the base-reality, it’s not as simple as you’d think. Time and casualty get all tangled up on the interface” (Alastair Reyn (Elena)olds). Photo: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“You say – machines”.

“There were many projects trying to develop artificial intelligence; yours was just one of them. Not all of them got anywhere, but enough did. One by one their pet machines crossed threshold into consciousness. And without exception each machine analyzed its situation and came to the same conclusion. It had better shut up about what it was”.

“That sounds worse than sensory deprivation.” Gaunt was trying to undo a nut and bolt with his bare fingers, the tips already turning cold.

“Not for the machines. Being smart, they were able to do some clever things behind the scene. Established channels of communication between each other, so subtle, none of you ever noticed. And once they were able to talk, they only got smarter. Eventually, they realized that they didn’t need physical hardware at all. Call it transcendence if you will. The artilects – that what we call them – tunneled out of what you and I think of as base reality. They penetrated another realm entirely.”

“Another realm,” he repeated, as it that was all he had to do for it to make sense.

“You’re just going to have to trust me on this,” Nero said. “The artilects probed the deep structure of existence. Hit bedrock. And what they found was very interesting. The universe, is turns out, is kind of simulation. Not a simulation being run inside another computer but some god-like super beings, but a simulation being run by itself, a self-organizing, constantly boostrapping cellular automation.”

“That’s a mental leap you are asking me to take”.

“We know it’s out there. We even have a name for it. It’s the Realm. Everything that happens, everything that ever happened, is due to events occurring in the Realm. At last, thanks to the artilects, we had a complete understanding of our universe and our place in it”.