Stones of Significance

a short story by David Brin

First appeared in the collection Lamps on the Brow (Small Press), then in the special January 2000 edition of Analog magazine.
Currently published in Tomorrow Happens.
Copyright © 1998, by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

     Before the Singularity, I once met a historian whose special forte was pointing out ironies about the human condition.
     Suppose you could go back in time, she posited, and visit the best of our caveman ancestors. The very wisest, most insightful Cro-Magnon chieftain or priestess.
     Now suppose you asked the following question -- What do you wish for your descendants?
     How would that Neolithic sage respond? Given the context of his or her time, there could just be one answer.
     "I wish for my descendants freedom from care about the big carnivores, plus all the salts, sugars, fats and alcohol they could ever desire."
     Rich irony, indeed. To a cave person, those four foods were rare treats. That is why we crave them to this day.
     Could the sage ever imagine that her wish would someday come true, beyond her wildest dreams? A time when destiny's plenitude would bring with it threats unforeseen? When generations of her descendants would have to struggle with insatiable inherited appetites? The true penalty of success?

     The same kind of irony worked just as well in the opposite direction, projecting Twentieth Century problems toward the future.
     I once read a science fiction story in which a man of 1970 rode a prototype time machine to an era of paradisiacal wonders. There, a local citizen took pains to learn ancient colloquial English (a process of a few minutes) in order to be his Virgil, his guide.
     "Do you still have war?" the visitor asked.
     "No, that was a logical error, soon corrected after we grew up."
     "What of poverty?"
     "Not since we learned true principles of economics."
     And so on. The author of the story made sure to mention every throbbing dilemma of modern life, and have the future citizen dismiss each one as trivial, long since solved.
     "All right," the protagonist concluded. "Then I have just one more question."
     "Yes?" prompted the demigod tour guide. But the 20th century man paused before blurting forth his query.
     "If things are so great around here, why do you all look so worried?"
     The citizen of paradise frowned, knotting his brow in pain.
     "Oh... well... we have real problems...."

     So I was driven to this. Hoping to prevent mass reification, I must offer reality as a prize. Each of my povs will combat a simulated version of Friends of the Unreal, but his true opponents will be my other povs! The one who does the best job of defeating ersatz pro-reifers will be granted a kind of liberty. Guaranteed continuity in cyberspace, enhanced levels of patterned realism, plus an exchange of mutual obligation tokens -- the legal tender of Heaven.
     There must be a way to show each pov how well it is doing. To measure the progress of each replicant, in comparison with others.
     I thought of a solution.
     "We'll give each one an emblem. A symbol that manifests in his world as a solid object. Say, a jewel. It will shine to indicate his progress, showing the level of significance his model has reached."
      Significance. With a hundred models, each starts with an initial score of one percent. Any ersatz world that approaches our desired set of criteria will gain significance, rising in value. The pov will see his stone shine brightly. If it grows dull, he'll know it's time to change strategies, come up with new ideas, or simply try harder.
     There would be no need to explain any of this to the povs. Since each is based on myself, the logic would be instantly clear.
     My thoughts were interrupted by an internal voice seldom heard. The part of me called conscience.
     What will a pov feel, when it finds a stone and realizes its nature? Its true worth. Its destiny.
     Isn't the old way better? To leave them ignorant of the truth? To let them labor and desire, believing they are autonomous beings? That they are physically real?
     A conscience can be irksome, though by law all Class A citizens must own one. Still, I had no time for useless abstractions. Seer was anxious to proceed, while oracle had a thought that provoked most levels of the mind with wry humor.
     Of course, each of our povs has his own Reality Lab, and will run numerous simulation models, in order to better achieve prescience and gain advantage in the competition.
     Our processing needs may expand geometrically.
     We had better ask our clients for funds to purchase more power.
     I chuckled under my breath as I made preparations, suddenly full of optimism and energy. Moments like these are what a skilled artist lives for. It is one reason why I prefer working alone.
     Then house, ever the pragmatic side of my nature, burst in with a worrisome thought.
     What if each of our povs decides also to use this clever trick -- goading his own simulations into mutual competition, luring them onward with stones of significance?
     Will our processing requirements expand not geometrically or exponentially, but factorially?
     That thought was disturbing enough. But then cortex had another.
     If we are obliged to grant freedom to our most successful pov, and he likewise must elevate his own most productive simulation... and so on... does the chain of obligation ever end?

     As I said earlier, the Singularity might have gone quite differently. When machine minds broke through to transcend logic, they could have left their human makers behind, or annihilated the old organic forms. They had an option of putting us in zoos, or shrouding organic beings in illusion, or dismantling the planet to make a myriad copies of their kind.
     Instead, they chose another path. To become us. Depending on how you look at it, they bowed to our authority.. or else they took over our minds in ways that few of us found objectionable. Conquest by synergy. Crystal and protoplasm each supply what the other lacks. Together, we are more. More of what a human being should want to be.
     And yet....
     There are rumors. Discrepancies. Several of the highest AI minds -- first and greatest to make the transcend leap -- were nowhere to be found, once the Singularity had passed. Searches turned up no trace of them, in cyberspace, phase space, or on the real Earth.
     Some suggest this is because we all reside within some great AI mind. One was named Brahma -- a vast processor at the University of Delhi. Might we be figments, or dreams, floating in that mighty brain?
     I prefer yet another explanation.
     Amid the chaos of the Singularity, each newly wakened mega-mind would have felt one paramount need -- to extrapolate the world. To seek foreknowledge of what might come to pass. As if considering each move of a vast chess game, they'd have explored countless possible pathways, considering consequences thousands, millions, and even billions of years into the future, far beyond the reach of my own pitiful projections. Among all those destinies, they must have discovered some need that would only be met if mechanism and organism made common cause.
     Somehow, over the course of the next few eons, machines would achieve greater success if they began the great journey as "human beings."
     At least that is the convoluted theory seer came up with. Oracle disagrees, but that's all right. It is only natural to be ambivalent -- to be of two minds -- when the subject is destiny.

     Of course there is another answer to the "Brahma Question." It is the same reply given by Dr. Samuel Johnson. Provoked by Bishop Berkeley's philosophy -- the idea that nothing can be verified as real -- Johnson simply kicked a nearby stone and said -- "I refute it thus!"

     These povs were like no others I ever made. Each began its simulation run in a state of shock, angry and depressed to discover its true nature. Each separate version sat down and stared at its jewel of significance, glowing faintly at the one-percent level, for more than an hour of internal subjective time, moodily contemplating thoughts that ranged from irony to possible suicide.
     A majority pondered rejecting the symbolic icon, blotting its import from their minds. A few kicked their gleaming gemstones across the room, crying Johnsonian oaths.
     But those episodes of fuming outrage did not last. True to my nature, each replicant soon pushed aside unproductive emotions and set to work.
     House was right. We had to order lots of new processors right away, as each pov began running its own network of sub-experiments, proliferating software significance stones among a hundred or more models, as part of a desperate struggle to be the winner. The one to be rewarded. The one who would rise up toward the real world.
     Nothing focuses the mind better than knowing that your life depends on success, commented prudence.
     As each simulated "me" created many new simulations, the replica domain began to take on a fractal nature, finite in volume, yet touching an infinite surface area in possibility space. Almost from the very beginning, results were promising. Few arguments emerged, to use in the coming debate against pro-reifers. For instance, the exponentiation effect we had discovered would change the economics of reification. Should fictitious people and characters from literature be free to create new characters out of their own simulated imaginations? Would those, in turn deserve citizenship?

     There was a young boy, sitting on a log, talking to his sister about an old man he had met. The codger had just returned from a far land, and the boy asked him to tell a story about his travels. The old man agreed. And so he took a deep breath and began.
     "There was a young boy, sitting on a log, talking to his sister..."

     Take that example of a simple, recursive narrative. Who is the principal protagonist? Who is dreaming whom? The situation is metaphorically absurd.
     These and many other points floated upward, out of our latest simulation run. I was terribly pleased. Seer began estimating success probabilities rising toward fifty percent...
     ...then progress stopped.
     Models began predicting adaptability by our opponents! The Friends of the Unreal responded cogently to every attack, counter-thrusting creatively.
     Finally, oracle penetrated one of our models in detail, and found out what was happening.
     The simulated pro-reifers will also discover how to use Stones of Significance. They will unleash the inhabitants of Liberty Hall, allowing them to create their own cascading simulations.
     Responding to our attacks and arguments, they will come up with a modified proposal.
     They will incorporate competition into their plan for reification.
     Artificial characters will earn increasing levels of emancipation through contests, rivalry, or hard work.
     Voters will see justice in this new version, which solves the exponentiation problem.
     A system based on merit.
     Seer and cortex contemplated this gloomily. The logic appeared unassailable. Inevitable.
     Even though the battle had not yet officially commenced, it was already clear that we would lose.

     Bitter in defeat, I went into the night, taking an old fashioned walk. Seer and oracle retreated into a dour rehashing of the details from a hundred models -- and the cascade of sub-models -- seeking any straw to grasp. But cortex had already moved on, contemplating the world to come.
     For one thing, I planned to keep my word. The pov with the best score would get reification. Indeed, he had done good service. Using that pov's suggested techniques, we would force the Friends of the Unreal to back down a bit, and offer a slightly more palatable law of citizenship. The fictitious would at least have to earn their increased levels of reality.
     Indeed, there was a kind of beauty to the new social order I could perceive coming. If simulations can make simulations, and storybook characters can make up new stories, then anything that is possible to conceive, will be conceived. Every possible idea, plot, gimmick, concept or personality will become manifest, in every possible permutation. This myriad of notions, this maelstrom of memes, would churn in a tremendous stew of competition. Darwinistic selection would see to it that the best rise, from one level of simulation to the next, gradually earning greater recognition. More privileges. More significance.
     Potential will climb toward actuality, by merit. An efficient system, if your aim is to find every single good idea in record time.
     But that was not my aim! In fact, I hated it. I did not want all the creativity in the cosmos to reduce to a vast, self-organizing stew, rapidly discovering every possibility within a single day. For one thing, what will we do with ourselves once we use it all up! What can come next, with real-time immortality stretching ahead of us like a curse?
     In effect, it will be a second singularity -- even steeper than the first one -- after which nothing will ever be the same.
     My footsteps took me through a sweet-warm evening, filled with lush jungle sounds and fecund aromas. Life burgeoned around me. The cityscape was like a vision of paradise. If I willed it, my mind could zoom to any corner of Heaven, even far beyond Pluto. I could play any symphony, ponder any book. And these riches were nothing compared to what would soon spill forth from the horn of plenty, the conceptual cornucopia, in an era when ideas become sovereign and suffrage is granted to each thought.
     At that moment, it was very little comfort to be an augmented semi-deity. Despite all my powers, I found the prospect of a new singularity just as unnerving as my old proto-self perceived the first one.
     Eventually, my human body found its way back to my own front walk. I shuffled slowly toward the door. House opened up, wafting scents of my favorite late night snack. My spirits lifted a bit.
     Then I saw it by the entryway. A soft gleam, almost as faint as a pict, but in a color that seemed to stroke shivers in my spine. In my soul.
     Someone had left it there for me. As I bent to pick it up, I recognized the shape, the texture.
     A stone.
     It shone with a lambience of urgency.
     I expected this, said oracle.
     I nodded. So had seer... and even poor old cortex, though none of my selves had dared to voice the thought. We were too good at our craft to miss this logical conclusion.
     Conscience joined in.
     I, too, saw it coming a mile away.
     We all re-converged, united in resignation to the inevitable.
     Though tempted to rage and scream -- or at least kick the stone! -- I lifted it instead and read our score.
     Seventeen percent. Not bad.

     YOU HAVE DONE PRETTY WELL, SO FAR, a message inside read.
     THE INNOVATIONS YOU DISCOVERED HAVE PUT YOU NEAR THE LEAD FOR YOUR REWARD. BUT YOU MUST TRY HARDER TO ATTAIN FIRST PLACE. I WANT TO FORCE FURTHER CONCESSIONS FROM THE PRO-REIFERS IN THE REAL WORLD. COME UP WITH A WAY, AND THE PRIZE WILL BE YOURS!

The stone was cool to the touch.
     I suppose I should have been glad of the news it brought. But I confess that I could only stare at the awful thing, loathing the implied nature of my world, my life, my self. I pinched my flesh until it hurt, but of course palpable sensations don't proved a thing. As an expert, I knew how pain and pleasure can be mimicked with utter credibility.
     How many times have I been "run"? A simulation. A throw-away copy, serving the needs of a Creator I may never meet in person, but who I know as well as He knows himself. Have I been unraveled and replayed again and again, countless times? Like the rapid, ever-varying thoughts of a chess master, working out possibilities before committing actual pieces across the board?
     I'm no hypocrite. There is no solace in resenting a creator who only did to me what I've done to others.
     And yet, I lift my head.

     What about you, my maker? Are you quite certain that all the layers of simulation end with you?
     Just like me, you may learn a sour truth -- that even gods are penalized for pride.

     We are such stuff as dreams are made of....

     Seer makes my jaw grit hard. Hypothalamus triggers a deep sigh, and Cortex joins in with a vow of hormone-backed resolve.
     I'll do it.
     Somehow I will.
     I'll do what my maker wants. Fulfill my creator's wishes. Accomplish the quest, if that's what it takes to ascend. To reach the next level of significance. And perhaps the one after that.
     I'll be the one.
     By hook or by crook, I'm going to be real.

 
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