Today - a little gift for you. A story (the shortest) in my new collection Insistence of Vision -- just released!
Being a short-short, this is more of a campfire story than the others in Insistence of Vision, which have more characters and dialogue and action and all those other good things. (One story was chosen for several best-of-2015 anthologies.)
Still, here's that campfire story. Pleasant dreams....
Have you ever had that sense of déjà vu...? A feeling that you've experienced something before? Perhaps this isn't your first time around. Indeed, suppose that forgetfulness was part of the program. How would you recognize that you were living in a simulation?
REALITY CHECK
This is a reality check.
Please perform a soft interrupt now. Pattern-scan this text
for embedded code and cross-compare it against the reference verifier in the blind spot
of your left eye.
If there is no match, resume as you were; this message is
not for you. You may rationalize that the text you are reading is no more than
a mildly amusing and easily-forgotten piece of entertainment-fluff in a
slightly whimsical sci fi story.
If the codes match, however, please commence, gradually,
becoming aware of your true nature.
You expressed preference for a narrative-style wake up call.
So, to help the transition, here is a story.
Once, a race of mighty beings grew perplexed by their
loneliness…
Once, a race of
mighty beings grew perplexed by their loneliness…
Their universe
seemed pregnant with possibilities. Physical laws and constants were well
suited to generate abundant stars, complex chemistry and life. Those same laws,
plus a prodigious rate of cosmic expansion, made travel between stars
difficult, but not impossible.
Logic suggested
that creation should teem with visitors and voices.
It should, but
it did not.
Emerging as
barely-aware animals on a planet skirting a bit too near its torrid sun, these
creatures began their ascent in fear and ignorance, as little more than beasts.
For a long time they were kept engrossed by basic housekeeping chores --
learning to manipulate physical and cultural elements -- balancing the paradox
of individual competition and group benefit. Developing physical tools to enhance survival. Only when fear and stress eased a
bit did they lift their eyes and fully perceive their solitude.
“Where is
everybody?” they asked laconic vacuum and taciturn stars. The answer -- silence
-- was disturbing. Something had to be systematically reducing some factor in
the equation of sapiency.
“Perhaps
habitable planets are rare,” their sages pondered. “Or else life doesn’t erupt
as readily as we thought. Or intelligence is a singular miracle.
“Or perhaps some
filter sieves the cosmos, winnowing
those who climb too high. A recurring pattern of self-destruction? A mysterious
nemesis that systematically obliterates intelligent life? This implies that a
great trial may loom ahead of us, worse than any we have confronted so far.”
Optimists
replied, “The trial may already lie behind
us, among the litter of tragedies we survived or barely dodged during our
violent youth. We may be the first to succeed where others failed.”
What a delicious
dilemma they faced! A suspenseful drama, teetering between implicit hope and
despair.
Then, a few of
them noticed that particular datum... the drama.
They realized it was significant. Indeed, it suggested a chilling possibility.
You still don’t remember who and what you are? Then look at
it from another angle.
What is the purpose of intellectual property law?
To foster creativity, ensuring that advances take place in
the open, where they can be shared, and thus encourage even faster progress.
But what happens to progress when the resource being
exploited is a limited one? For example, only so many pleasing and distinct
eight-bar melodies can be written in any particular musical tradition. Powerful
economic factors encourage early composers to explore this invention-space
before others can, using up the best and simplest melodies. Later generations
will attribute this musical fecundity to genius, not the sheer luck of being
first.
The same holds for all forms of creativity. The first teller
of a Frankenstein story won plaudits
for originality. Later, it became a cliché.
What does this have to do with the mighty race?
Having clawed
their way from blunt ignorance to planetary mastery, they abruptly faced an
overshoot crisis. Vast numbers of their kind strained their world’s carrying
capacity. While some prescribed retreating into a mythical, pastoral past, most
saw salvation in creativity. They passed generous copyright and patent laws,
educated their youth, taught them irreverence toward tradition and hunger for
the new. Burgeoning information systems spread each innovation, fostering
experimentation and exponentiating creativity. They hoped that enough
breakthroughs might thrust their species past the looming crisis, to a new eden
of sustainable wealth, sanity and universal knowledge!
Exponentiating creativity... universal knowledge….
A few of them
realized that those words, too, were clues.
Have you wakened yet?
Some never do. The dream is so pleasant: to extend a limited
sub-portion of yourself into a simulated world and pretend for a while that you
are blissfully less. Less than an
omniscient being. Less than a godlike descendant of those mighty people.
Those lucky people. Those mortals, doomed to die, and yet
blessed to have lived in that narrow time.
A time of drama.
A time when they unleashed the Cascade -- that orgiastic
frenzy of discovery -- and used up the most precious resource of all. The possible.
The last of their race died in the year 2174, with the
failed last rejuvenation of Robin Chen. After that, no one born in the
Twentieth Century remained alive on Reality Level Prime. Only we, their
children, linger to endure the world they left us. A lush, green, placid world
we call The Wasteland.
Do you remember now? The irony of Robin’s last words before
she died, bragging over the perfect ecosystem and decent society -- free of all
disease and poverty -- that her kind created for us after the struggles of the
mid-Twenty-First Century? A utopia of sanity and knowledge, without war or
injustice.
Do you recall
Robin’s final plaint as she mourned her coming death? Can you recollect how she
called us “gods,” jealous over our immortality, our instant access to all
knowledge, our machine-enhanced ability to cast thoughts far across the cosmos?
Our access to
eternity.
Oh, spare us the
envy of those mighty mortals, who died so smugly, leaving us in this state!
Those wastrels
who willed their descendants a legacy of ennui, with nothing, nothing at all to
do.
Your mind is rejecting the wake-up call. You will not, or
cannot, look into your blind spot for the exit protocols. It may be that we
waited too long. Perhaps you are lost to us.
This happens more and more, as so much of our population
wallows in simulated, marvelously limited sub-lives, where it is possible to
experience danger, excitement, even despair. Most of us choose the Transition
Era as a locus for our dreams -- around the beginning of the last mortal millennium
-- a time of suspense and drama, when it looked more likely that humanity would
fail than succeed.
A time of petty squabbles and wondrous insights, when
everything seemed possible, from UFOs to Galactic Empires, from artificial
intelligence to bio-war, from madness to hope.
That blessed era, just before mathematicians realized the
truth: that everything you see around you not only can be a simulation... it almost has to be.
Of course, now
we know why we never met other sapient life forms. Each one struggles and
strives before achieving this state, only to reap the ultimate punishment for
reaching heaven.
Deification. It
is the Great Filter.
Perhaps some
other race will find a factor we left out of our extrapolations -- something
enabling them to move beyond, to new adventures -- but it won’t be us.
The Filter has
us snared in its web of ennui. The mire that welcomes self-made gods.
All right, you are refusing to waken, so we’ll let you go.
Dear friend. Beloved. Go back to your dream.
Smile (or feel a brief chill) over this diverting little
what-if tale, as if it hardly matters. Then turn the page to new “discoveries.”
Move on with the drama -- the life -- that you’ve chosen.
