Twenty-Five
The Internet is constantly evolving. In some ways it evolves the way a city evolves, but also the way the underlying civilization does.
From Martin's cave, on his terminal, I decided to do a little exploring.
There are many layers beneath the surface of any city that long ago became rubble, that have mostly disappeared, but that might still be found in artifacts and pieced back together. True in Meat Space, true to some extent here.
Back in the early part of the century I learned that some of my own work, for instance, from the 1980s and early 1990s, was saved to Usenet, which itself is (in Cloud terms) a bit like being buried under rubble. You might find bits and pieces of Usenet in a Google search, but the links are all dead, and much of the content has been erased as well. Sort of like a silent movie, made in the years before preservation became an industry fetish.
Then there are sites from the early days of the Web that, while they continue to exist at sites like Archive.org, do so in a kind of time warp, like old bars on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, or a 19th century hovel near Beijing. Sometimes time goes right by you and you're allowed to become a relic, even precious to later times.
Slashdot is such a place. Very much an ancient Manhattan dive bar. It was very big at the turn of the century, but was quickly replaced, it failed to keep up with the graphic times, and by 2020 it was barely maintained. Someone outside was still fighting to keep the lights on, or someone had just forgotten to turn them off, and old programmers were still hanging about, like online wraiths, still fighting the old fights and arguing the old arguments of their youth. I wondered how many were in the Cloud, and how many were left on the outside.
“News for Nerds,” said the old sub-head on the home page. “Stuff that matters.” Matters to whom, I'd thought. But I used the (non-Google) search box anyway.
“Cloud personalities,” I tried, then looked through the results. “Editing cloud personalities.” I went through page-after-page, wondering what the keyword was, or if there was a right phrase, that might lead to where I needed to go.
“Cloud persona code,” I entered. Here it was, the sixth result.
“November 17, 2028,” I read. “Robert Stalls went to his final rest today, but he left behind an open source version of his mind, of his spirit and personality, asking that it be kept, edited at will, and saved for future reference, on Github.
Robert Stalls. A pioneering computer scientist. The father of “free and open source” (FOSS) software – never call it “open source,” that was something else entirely. The man behind the General Public License, founder of the Free Software Foundation. Activist, bomb-thrower, anarchist, paranoid. A self-styled secular saint, with his long hair and beard, which I'd watched grow white just as mine had, decades ago.
He'd gone to India in his last years, I recalled, where he was treated like a computer version of Gandhi or the Buddha, an honor the faster-moving West would never have offered. Except for clouds and fast data transfer, much of India's infrastructure remained painfully slow to westerners, thus Stalls was terribly relevant. The concepts and programming styles of the past would suit him to the ground.
Now if the link only worked…
It did. A home page appeared. “The Stalls Project,” I read. Maintained by the Vivesaratra College of Engineering in Bangalore, India. I still couldn't read code, but I could certainly read comments and discussion threads.
I began exploring.
Thank God Indians have English, the great unifying force in a nation with hundreds of maintained languages, and dozens of major ones. It was the lingua franca of international business, and by international they often meant the next state over.
The surround of many pages on The Stalls Project was filled with the obscure (to me) characters of Kannada , the old script of Karnataka, still used by millions of people but as foreign to Americans as hieroglyphs themselves.
But inside those windows, I found the threads I was looking for.
There. Just two springs ago, Professor Anand Sitaraman assigned his third year students at BSCME a project on developing utilities that might separate jumbled personalities into their constituent parts.
I might have known it would turn out to be an Indian, a team from the land of the Buddha.
I began to read…
Twenty-Six
“Processing power,” I told the Blaines, the way that middle-aged executive had told Dustin Hoffman's character in “The Graduate” that the secret to life was “plastics.”
As soon as I had what I needed committed to a stick memory, I had run over to Martin Bexar's place, grabbed him roughly by the collar, and dragged him here to 10 Downing Street, as though I were Holmes and he were Watson, on a case, running through the black front door, ignoring the form in front of me and speaking to both personalities inside it.
“The good news is that there is a way to separate personalities. The bad news is it requires an enormous amount of processing power, power that can't be accessed within the Cloud without The Doctor hearing about it.”
The sadness I felt coming from them now was palpable, unbearable, a hopelessness beyond even the acknowledgement of death. It was clear to me then that the Blaines feared The Doctor, who had accomplished what they failed to do, in the same way a failed politician might fear a Prime Minister who had once been part of the same incoming class of the Parliament. They were in his thrall, or so they appeared to feel.
“Yet, there is hope,” I added, not knowing exactly what I might say next.
“What is it?” he/she/they demanded.
So I brainstormed, out loud, the way I had in life.
“If we can get the processing done outside the Cloud, in some sort of quantum computer with a single connection from Meat Space to the Cloud, then the results could be loaded into the Cloud and you might possibly be able to occupy them.
“It's risky. I don't think anyone has done a personality transfer out from the Cloud, into another system. The transfer is designed to bring people inside. The input is biological, not digital. But in theory, it should be able to work.” That's what the programmers at The Stalls Project had been leading toward, at any rate, but it was still all beta code.
“There's another way,” said Martin/Watson. “What if the operator kept someone who was coming in, for just a short time. They transfer an individual here, leaving an empty husk. Instead of having them die, they transfer a single personality from the quantum computer into the husk.”
“Then there are two of you. There can't be two of one person,” I said. “They would share the same index term, and anything sent to one would be bounced. Including any signals necessary to maintain a Cloud-based existence.”
“Or how about this?” Martin/Watson continued. “Have two people ready to come into the Cloud, in different locations. Load the new files into those people, then have us connect in and come back. Each would have their own index term, their own identity here coming in from there.”
“I'm not sure I understand,” I said.
“We know which of us is which,” said the Blaines (or the Blaine). “That's what is driving us both crazy. We'll recognize ourselves, on the outside, and after that transfer you erase what we are now before you load the two husks back in.”
I sat back to think about that a minute.
It was risky as all get out. An act of desperation. What if one of the husks in Meat Space actually died before the transfers were both complete? What if the single entities created by the programs we'd found had some errors in them, if the quantum copies were damaged in some way? What if it couldn't be coordinated? What if the Blaine couldn't separate properly, if they both wound up in one husk or the other?
“We're talking about physical sciences, psychology, computer science, biology all coordinating and working together seamlessly,” I said. “One or both of you could easily die, really disappear, anywhere in the process. We would also be using husks without permission. I don't know…”
“Please,” the Blaine said, in a way that proved to me it was both of them speaking together. “If we can be separated, maybe the Doctor can be made into one whole as well.”
“I'll look into it,” I promised.
The whole idea made no sense, I told Martin, as I sipped green tea and he enjoyed what looked like a double Glenlivet on ice.
We were in a model of a Japanese Isakaya Martin had created, amazingly realistic. Outside was what looked like a dark Tokyo night, studded with lamplight and neon. Inside, a few small tables, what looked like a sushi bar, and rows of bottles above it, some Japanese sake magnums, others whiskey bottles with lines drawn on them to indicate where their owners had drunk to. Beyond us was the happy chatter of Japanese salarymen unwinding, cooks acting as bartenders do in the West, and a lovely young woman clad in geisha garb serving us and a few others.
“Anything can make as much or as little sense as you want it to,” Martin said. “That's why I invited you here. This isn't something from my own life. It's from someone else's.
“They invited me for a drink months ago, but what's interesting is that this wasn't a bar from my friend's life either. No, he'd been with a former Softbank executive who thought he had stroked out a few years ago. The two of them came here. My friend remembered it, brought me here. I remembered it, brought you here.
“The memories transferred, the code moving across like a token, across three people, with no degradation.”
I served myself from the small cast metal teapot in front of me. The geisha brought Martin some udon soup and me a bento box featuring eel on rice. The smells were exquisite.
“You're able to experience this completely, inhabit this place and know it as though it were in the physical world, or at least part of our living memory, even though neither of us have ever been here before, in the Cloud or in life,” Martin said, placing his drink on the table and picking up some chopsticks. “How is that possible?”
I scooped up some eel-and-rice on my own chopsticks, then savored it a moment, before answering. “You're right. Experience is transferable,” I guessed.
Martin brought a hand onto the table, hard. “Exactly!” he said, smiling broadly, in full Holmes mode now.
“And if individual experiences are transferable, them memories are transferable. And if memories are transferable, so are personalities.
“With a little cooperation, you can make this work. You're brilliant, Dave. Brilliant.”
Maybe I was Watson after all.
Twenty-Seven
I stood over Martin's shoulder in his cave/hovel, and dictated a short letter to him.
Dear John:
This is a friend you led to the other side, writing to tell you my soul is well and to ask a small favor.
We have souls here who remain troubled, by things that have happened to them since they crossed over. They feel confused, as though they were not alone, and they wish to find peace.
Of course, we are not men and women. We are computer constructs. We are software, magnetic ink. Or so you may think. But thinking is the point. We still think, we still remember, and so we still have feelings.
Your friend,
The Late Dave Blanks
I made us a pot of green tea. I knew it was all an artificial construct, as were we all, but if you want to be literal isn't everybody? Aren't you? Your world is only made real by your senses, after all, and the world you sense is quite different than that of your cat, or a fly. Which is real?
Martin saw I was in a good mood, and was almost sad when we were alerted that a response to my note was coming in.
Dear Dave:
It was a pleasure reading your message. I remember your passing well, and I am pleased that you are doing well.
I understand some of what you are asking. There are people here who understand the questions you ask in far more detail than I can offer.
I will do more research. If you have some specifics they would help.
Liza says hi.
Your friend,
John Willis
The last was curious. I had only met John's assistant briefly. I asked Martin about it, but he responded the man was just being polite, that I should ignore it and move forward.
So I did.
I sent John my Slashdot links, then found some more. We got a good back-and-forth traffic going, although I felt like a hoodlum. In our writings both of us were careful not to say anything that could be traced back to the real problem we were discussing, the issue of dividing souls within the Cloud (or just The Community, as John called it) after they had merged. I couldn't explain why I wasn't being more explicit, and John never explained from his side either. It was all badda-bing, badda-boom.
But I didn't ask those questions. In retrospect I was just thrilled to have someone on the outside to talk with.
I peppered my emails with mundane questions about the real world, about how my old hometown looked, whether anyone had bought my house, how the local sports teams were doing. I could have answered these questions myself easily, using the Web, but it felt better to have John tell me, and it padded out our correspondence so it would appear more mundane if anyone connected to The Doctor were looking for it.
This went on for many days. I guess I slept. I think John did. There was one very long break, which Martin and I spent watching the Champions League final at a sports bar I had once known, awaiting an alert through an old-fashioned 1980s beeper I put on my belt.
Finally, some hours after Barcelona won again, Martin nudged me awake. I had turned down my output and let my mind wander, “dreaming” as Martin called it, on a pallet he had placed near his monitor.
The message was all I had been hoping for, and more:
Dear Dave:
I think I have the answers you seek.
Rather than send you a file I have entrusted them to someone you know.
Expect a visit soon.
John
That was the last note I got until a virtual knock came on my virtual door, a half-hour later.
I walked to the door, and opened it.
There before me stood Liza. In the “flesh?”
