Robert Sawyer - Calculating God

Susan lifted her shoulders. “If it were on the table — if it was something you were being offered right now — my response might be different. You know that . . .” She trailed off, but I knew she’d been about to say that she’d do anything to keep from losing me. I squeezed her hand.

“But,” she continued, “if it weren’t for that, if it weren’t for what we’re facing, I’d say no. I can’t imagine it being something I’d want.”

“You’d live forever,” I said.

“No, I’d exist forever. That’s not the same thing.”

“It could all be simulated, of course. Every aspect of life.”

“If it isn’t real,” said Susan, “it isn’t the same.”

“You wouldn’t be able to tell that it wasn’t real.”

“Perhaps not,” Susan said. “But I’d know it wasn’t, and that would make all the difference.”

I shrugged a little. “Ricky seems just as happy playing Nintendo baseball as he is playing the real game — in fact, he plays the computer version more often; I don’t think his generation is going to have the conceptual problems with this that we do.” I paused. “A virtual existence does have its appeals. You wouldn’t have to grow old. You wouldn’t have to die.”

“I like growing and changing.” She frowned. “I mean, sure, I sometimes wish I still had the body I’d had when I was eighteen, but I’m mostly content.”

“Civilization after civilization seems to decide to do this.”

Susan frowned. “You say they either upload themselves or blow themselves up?”

“Apparently. Hollus said his people faced the same sort of nuclear crisis we’re still facing.”

“Maybe they decide they have no choice but to trade reality for a simulation, then. If, say, the U.S. and China were to go to war, we’d all probably die, and the human race would be over. But if this were all a simulation, and things went bad, you could just reset the simulation and go on existing. Maybe unreal existence is the only long-term hope for violent races.”

That was certainly an intriguing thought. Maybe you didn’t outgrow your desire to blow each other up. Maybe it was inevitable that some nation, or some group of terrorists, or just some lunatic, would do it; as Hollus had said, the ability to destroy life on a massive scale becomes cheaper, more portable, and more readily available as time goes by. If there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle — whether it’s nuclear bombs, biological weaponry, or some other tool of mass destruction — then perhaps races transcend just as soon as they can, because it’s the only safe thing to do.

“I wonder what humanity will choose when the time comes?” I said. “Presumably, we’ll have the technology within a century.” No need to state it dramatically; Susan and I were in the same boat on timeframes that long. “You and I won’t live to see it, but Ricky might. I wonder what they will choose to do?”

Susan was quiet for a few moments. She then started shaking her head slowly back and forth. “I’d love for my son to live forever, but . . . but I hope he, and everyone, chooses normal existence.”

I thought about that — about the pain of skinned knees and broken hearts and broken bones; about the risks flesh was susceptible to; about what I’d been going through.

I doubted there was any way to reverse the decision. If you copied whatever you were into a computer, you presumably couldn’t go back. If the biological version of you continued on, it would have a separate existence from the moment the scan was made. There’d be no way to reintegrate the two versions later on; it would be like trying to force identical twins to inhabit a single body.

There were no intelligent lifeforms left on any of those six worlds Hollus’s starship had explored. Perhaps all races terminated the biological versions of themselves once the electronic ones were created. Indeed, perhaps that was the only sensible thing to do, preventing any possibility of terrorist disruptions of the virtual world. Of course, at least on Earth, there were those who would never agree to be voluntarily uploaded — the Amish, Luddites, and others. But they might be scanned surreptitiously, moving them into a virtual world indistinguishable from the one they’d left, rather than leaving any flesh-and-blood beings around whose descendants might vandalize the computers.

I wondered if any of the races that had transcended regretted their decision?

Susan and I got ready for bed. She eventually drifted off to sleep, but I lay awake, staring at the dark ceiling, envying the Wreeds.

Shortly after I’d been diagnosed, I’d walked the few blocks from the ROM to the Chapters flagship store on Bloor Street and had bought Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. She outlined the five stages of coming to terms with death: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance; by my own reckoning I was now well into number five, although there were occasional days on which I felt as though I was still mired in number four. Nonetheless, almost everyone went through the stages in the same sequence. Was it surprising, then, that there were stages whole species went through?

Hunter-gatherer.

Agriculture or animal husbandry.

Metallurgy.

Cities.

Monotheism.

An age of discovery.

An age of reason.

Atomic energy.

Space travel.

An information revolution.

A flirtation with interstellar voyaging.

And then—

And then—

And then something else.

As a Darwinian, I’ve spent countless hours explaining to lay-people that evolution doesn’t have a goal, that life is an ever-branching bush, a pageant of shifting adaptations.

But now, perhaps, it seemed as though there was a goal, a final result.

The end of biology.

The end of pain.

The end of death.

I was, on some visceral level — an appropriate metaphor, invoking guts and biology and humanity — dead-set against the idea of giving up corporeal existence. Virtual reality was nothing but air guitar writ large. My life had meaning because it was real. Oh, I’m sure I could use a virtual-reality device to send me on simulated digs, and I could find simulated fossils, including even breakthrough specimens (such as, oh, I don’t know, say, a sequence showing in a thousand graduated steps the change from one species into another . . .). But it would be meaningless, pointless; I’d just be a glider shooting out of a gun. There’d be no thrill of discovery — the fossils would be there simply because I wanted them to be there. And they would contribute nothing to our real knowledge of evolution. I never know in advance what I will find on a dig — no one knows. But whatever I do find has to fit into that vast mosaic of facts discovered by Buckland and Cuvier and Mantell and Dollo and von Huene and Cope and Marsh and the Sternbergs and Lambe and Park and Andrews and Colbert and the older Russell and the younger, unrelated Russell and Ostrom and Jensen and Bakker and Homer and Weishampel and Dodson and Dong and Zheng and Sereno and Chatterjee and Currie and Brett-Surman and all the rest, pioneers and my contemporaries. It was real; itwas part of the shared universe.

But now, here I was spending most of my time with a virtual-reality simulation. Yes, there was a real flesh-and-blood Hollus somewhere, and yes, I’d even met him. But most of my interactions were with something computer-generated, a cyberghost. One could easily get sucked into an artificial world. Yes, one surely could.

I hugged my wife, savoring reality.

I hadn’t slept well last night or the night before, and I guess the fatigue was getting to me. I’d tried — I had really tried — to be stoic about what I was going through, to keep a stiff upper lip. But today —