"Schild’s Ladder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Иган Грег)

Thanks to John Baez, Jennifer Brehl, Caroline Oakley, Anthony Cheetham, John Douglas, Simon Spanton, Oisín Murphy-Lawless, Devi Pillai, Peter Robinson, Russell Galen, Carol Jackson, Emma Bailey, Diana Mackay, Philip Patterson, Christodoulos Litharis, Nicola Fantini, Giancarlo Carlotti, Albert Solé, Petr Kotrle, Makoto Yamagishi, Florin Pîtea, and Mihai-Dan Pavelescu.

Chapter 2

Riding her ion scooter the million kilometers to the Quietener, Cass found herself reveling in the view for the first time in years. The scooter was doing one-and-a-quarter gees, but the couch pressed against her back so gently that she might have been floating. Floating in dark water, beneath an alien sky. Even at half a light-year, Mimosa punched a dazzling violet hole in the blackness, a pinprick ten times as bright as a full moon. Away from its glare, the stars were far too plentiful to suggest constellations; any stick-figure object that she began to sketch between them was soon undermined by an equally compelling alternative, then a third, then a fourth — like a superposition of graphs, each with a different choice of edges between the same nodes. When she’d first arrived, she’d homed in on her own star, watching with a mixture of fear and exaltation as it hovered at the edge of visibility to her thousandth-scale eyes. Now, she’d forgotten all the cues she’d need to find it, and she felt no urge to ask her navigation software to remind her. The sun was no beacon of reassurance, and she’d be seeing it close-up again soon enough.

Each time one of Livia’s staged targets had been achieved, Cass had dispatched a small army of digital couriers to pass on the news to seven generations of her ancestors and descendants, as well as all her friends in Chalmers. She’d received dozens of messengers herself, mostly from Lisa and Tomek, full of inconsequential gossip, but very welcome. It must have grown strange for her friends as the years had passed, and they no longer knew whether or not there was any point continuing to shout into the void. If she had traveled embodied, as a handful of ancients still did, she could have caught up with centuries of mail on the return voyage. Reduced to a timeless signal en route, though, she’d have no choice but to step unprepared into the future. Her homecoming was going to be the hardest thing she’d ever faced, but she was almost certain now that her time here would prove to have been worth it.

Half an hour before arrival, Cass rolled onto her stomach and poked her head over the edge of the couch. Her engine’s exhaust was a barely perceptible flicker, fainter than a methanol flame by daylight, but she knew that if she reached down and placed her hand in the stream of plasma, she’d rapidly lose any delusion that her Mimosan body was indestructible.

She watched the Quietener growing beneath her, the silvery sphere glinting Mimosa-blue. Surrounding it was a swarm of smaller, twinned spheres, unevenly colored and far less lustrous. Tethers, invisibly slender, allowed the twins to orbit each other, while ion jets balanced the slight tug of the Quietener’s gravity, keeping each pair’s center of mass fixed against the stars.

The Quietener made it possible to perform experiments that could never be carried out elsewhere. The right distribution of matter and energy could curve space-time in any manner that Einstein’s equations allowed, but creating a chosen state of quantum geometry was a very different proposition. Rather than simply bending space-time in bulk, like a slab of metal in a foundry, it had to be controlled with the same kind of precision as the particles in a two-slit interference experiment. But the "particles" of geometry were twenty-five orders of magnitude smaller than atoms, and they could never be vaporized, ionized, or otherwise coaxed apart to be handled one by one. So the same degree of delicacy had to be achieved with the equivalent of a ten-tonne lump of iron.

Refining the starting material helped, and the Quietener did its best to screen out every form of impurity. Ordinary matter and magnetic fields absorbed or deflected charged particles, while a shell of exotic nuclei, trapped by gamma-ray lasers in states from which they could not decay without absorbing neutrinos, mopped up a greater fraction of the billions wandering by than would have been stopped by a galaxy’s-worth of lead.

Gravitational waves passed through anything, so the only antidote was a second train of waves, tailored to cancel out the first. There was nothing to be done about sporadic cataclysms — supernovae, or black holes gorging on star clusters in the centers of distant galaxies — but the most persistent gravitational waves, coming from local binary stars, were cyclic, predictable, and faint. So the Quietener was ringed with countersources, their orbits timed to stretch space at the center of the device when the bodies they mimicked squeezed it, and vice versa.

As Cass passed within a few kilometers of one of the counter-sources, she could see the aggregate rocky surface that betrayed its origins in Mimosa’s rubble of asteroids. Every scrap of material here had been dragged out of that system’s gravity well over a period of almost a thousand years, a process initiated by a package of micron-sized spores sent from Viro, the nearest inhabited world, at ninety percent of lightspeed. The Mimosans themselves had come from all over, traveling here just as Cass had once the station was assembled.

The scooter’s smooth deceleration brought her to a halt beside a docking bay, and she was weightless again. Whenever she was close enough to either the station or the Quietener to judge her velocity, it seemed to be little more than that of a train, giving the impression that in the five-hour journey she might have traveled the width of a continent on Earth. Not to the moon and back, and more.

One wall of the bay had handholds. As Cass pulled herself along, Rainzi appeared beside her. The Mimosans had dusted projectors and cameras all over the walls of the places she visited in the Quietener, rendering guest and host mutually visible.

"This is it!" Rainzi said cheerfully. "Barring untimely supernovae, we’ll finally get to see your graph complete." The software portrayed him with a jet pack, to rationalize his ability to follow her uneven progress up the wall without touching anything.

Cass replied stoically, "I’ll believe it when it happens." In fact, from the moment Ilene had scheduled the run, twelve hours before, Cass had felt insanely confident that no more hurdles remained. Eight of the fourteen previous targets had been achieved at the first attempt, making the prospect of one more tantalizingly plausible. But she was reluctant to admit to taking anything for granted, and if something did go wrong it would be easier to swallow her disappointment if she’d been pretending from the start that her expectations had always been suitably modest.

Rainzi didn’t argue, but he ignored her feigned pessimism. He said, "I have a proposition for you. A new experience you might like to try, to celebrate the occasion. I suspect it will be against all your high-minded principles, but I honestly believe you’d enjoy it. Will you hear me out?"

He wore a look of such deadpan innocence that Cass felt sure he knew exactly how this sounded in translation. If that was his meaning, the idea wasn’t entirely absurd, or unwelcome. She’d grown fond of Rainzi, and if he’d never been quite as solicitous or as eager to understand her as Darsono, the truth was, that made him more intriguing. If they could find enough common ground to become lovers, it might be a fitting way to bid Mimosa farewell: sweeping away the mutually distorted views they had of each other. To remain loyal to the ideals of embodiment, here, she’d been forced to adopt a kind of asceticism, but that was definitely not a quality to which she’d ever aspired, let alone one for which she hoped to be remembered.

She said, "I’m listening."

"For special events like this, we sometimes go nuclear. So I thought I’d ask whether you’d like to join us."

Cass froze, and stared at him. "Nuclear? How? Has someone solved all the problems?" Femtomachines built from exotic nuclei had been employed as special-purpose computers ever since the basic design had been developed, six thousand years before. For sheer speed, they left every other substrate in the dust. But as far as Cass knew, no one could make a femtomachine stable for more than a few picoseconds; they could perform a great many calculations in that time, but then they blew themselves apart and left you hunting through the debris for the answer. Gamma-ray spectroscopy could only extract a few hundred kilobytes, which was orders of magnitude too small even for a differential memory — a compressed description of experience that could be absorbed by a frozen reference copy of the person who’d actually lived through it. Cass might have missed the news of a breakthrough while she’d been on her way here from Earth, but if word had reached Mimosa Station at all she should have heard by now.

"Nothing’s changed in the technology," Rainzi said. "We do it freestyle. One-way."

Freestyle meant implementing your mind on a substrate that underwent quantum divergence. One-way meant none of the end products of any version of the computation could be retrieved, and transferred back into your usual hardware. Rainzi was asking her to clone herself into a nuclear abacus-cum-time-bomb that would generate a multitude of different versions of her, while holding out no prospect of even one survivor.

Cass said haltingly, "No, I’m sorry. I can’t join you." So much for feeling smugly unshockable for daring to contemplate cross-modal sex. She joked, "I draw the line at any implementation where I experience detectable weight changes every time I learn something." Femtomachines shuffled binding energies equivalent to a significant portion of their own mass; it would be like gaining or losing half a kilogram several times a second, from the sheer gravity of your thoughts.

Rainzi smiled. "I thought you’d say no. But it would have been discourteous not to ask."

"Thank you. I appreciate that."

"But you’d see it as a kind of death?"

Cass scowled. "I’m embodied, not deranged! If a copy of my mind experiences a few minutes' consciousness, then is lost, that’s not the death of anyone. It’s just amnesia."

Rainzi looked puzzled. "Then I don’t understand. I know you prefer embodiment, for the sake of having honest perceptions of your surroundings, but we’re not talking about immersing you in some comforting simulation of being back on Earth. Your experiment should last almost six picoseconds. Running on a strong-force substrate, you’d have a chance to watch the data coming in, in real time. Of course, you’ll receive a useful subset of the same information eventually, but it won’t be as detailed, or as immediate. It won’t be as real."

He smiled provocatively. "Suppose the ghost of Sarumpaet came to you in your sleep, and said: I’ll grant you a dream in which you witness the decay of the Diamond Graph. You’ll travel back in time, shrink to the Planck scale, and see everything with your own eyes, exactly as it happened. The only catch is, you won’t remember anything when you wake. You say you don’t believe that the dreamer would be dying. So wouldn’t you still want the dream?"

Cass let go of one handhold and swiveled away from the wall. There wasn’t much point objecting that he was offering her a view billions of times coarser than that, of a much less significant event. It wasn’t a ringside seat at the birth of the universe, but it was still the closest she could hope to get to an event for which she’d already sacrificed seven hundred and forty-five years of her life.

She said, "It’s not the fact that I wouldn’t remember the experience. If you’ve lived through something, you’ve lived through it. What worries me is all the other things I’d have to live through. All the other people I’d have to become."

Cass dated the advent of civilization to the invention of the quantum singleton processor. The Qusp. She accepted the fact that she couldn’t entirely avoid splitting into multiple versions; interacting with any ordinary object around her gave rise to an entangled system — Cass plus cloud, Cass plus flower — and she could never hope to prevent the parts that lay outside her from entering superpositions of different classical outcomes, generating versions of her who witnessed different external events.

Unlike her hapless ancestors, though, she did not contribute to the process herself. While the Qusp inside her skull performed its computations, it was isolated from the wider world — a condition lasting just microseconds at a time, but rigidly enforced for the duration — only breaking quarantine when its state vector described one outcome, with certainty. With each operating cycle, the Qusp rotated a vector describing a single alternative into another with the same property, and though the path between the two necessarily included superpositions of many alternatives, only the final, definite state determined her actions.

Being a singleton meant that her decisions counted. She was not forced to give birth to a multitude of selves, each responding in a different way, every time she found her conscience or her judgment balanced on a knife edge. She was not at all what Homo sapiens had actually been, but she was close to what they’d believed themselves to be, for most of their history: a creature of choice, capable of doing one thing and not another.

Rainzi didn’t pursue the argument; he followed her in silence as she clambered into the display chamber. This was a small cavity in the Quietener’s outer structure, not much larger than her room at the station, equipped with a single chair. There was no question of Cass being allowed any closer to the action; even the processor on which the Mimosans were running, scrupulously designed to spill as little noise into the environment as possible, was banished to the rim of the Quietener. Lacking the same antinoise features herself, she had to agree to be snap-frozen to a few Kelvin, three minutes before each run. Apart from being immobilized, this had no unpleasant side effects, but it served as an uncomfortable reminder of the fact that the closed-cycle "breathing" of her Mimosan body was pure placebo. Still, she’d been willing to put up with it twenty times so far, merely for the sake of sparing herself the three-second time lag for data to make its way back to the station.

As she took her place in the cryogenic chair, the other Mimosans began to appear around her. Teasing her, congratulating her on her stamina. Livia joked, "We should have had a wager as to whether or not the incremental targets would turn out to be a waste of time. You could have relieved me of all my worldly goods by now." Livia’s sole material possession was a replica of an ancient bronze coin, carved from leftover asteroid metal.

Cass shook her head. "What would I have put up? My left arm?" They’d been right to do things Livia’s way, and Cass had long ago ceased resenting it. Not only was it safer, it was better science, testing each novel structure one by one.

It turned out that Livia was alluding to a real wager: Bakim admitted that he’d made a bet with Darsono that Cass would not remain at Mimosa to the end. But he was unable to explain the stakes to her; her Mediator couldn’t find a suitable analogy, and nothing she suggested herself was even close. No precious object or information would change hands, nor was there any token act of servitude or humiliation in store for the loser. Cass was amused by the bet itself, but it bothered her that she could only grasp half of what was going on. When her friends asked her about the Mimosans, would all her stories end with apologies for her own incomprehension? She might as well have visited one of the great cities back on Earth and spent her time living in a storm-water drain, having shouted conversations through a narrow grill with the people at street level, full of misunderstandings about objects and events she couldn’t even glimpse.

Rainzi had clearly been delegated to put the Nuclear Question to her, because no one else broached the subject. Cass found it slightly galling that they wouldn’t even suffer a moment’s embarrassment when they took up their superior vantage point. They wouldn’t depart, they wouldn’t abandon her; they’d simply clone their minds into the nuclear substrate. With no expectation of recovering the clones, the originals would have no reason to pause, even for a picosecond, while their faster versions ran.

The target graph appeared on the wall in front of her. The four distinctive node patterns they’d tried in every other combination were all present now. Just as virtual particles stabilized the ordinary vacuum — creating a state of matter and geometry whose most likely successor was itself — Cass’s four patterns steered the novo-vacuum closer to the possibility of persistence. The balance was only approximate: according to the Sarumpaet rules, even an infinite network built from this motif would decay into ordinary vacuum in a matter of seconds. At the Planck scale, that was no small achievement; a tightrope walker who managed to circum-navigate the Earth a few billion times before toppling to the ground might be described as having similarly imperfect balance. In reality, any fragment of novo-vacuum they managed to create would be surrounded from the start by its older, vastly more stable relative, and would face the inevitable about a trillion times faster.

Ilene reeled off a list of measurements from the instrument probes that were monitoring their environment, out to a radius of more than a light-hour. There was nothing on its way that could wreck the experiment — or at least, nothing traveling slower than ninety-five percent of lightspeed. Zulkifli followed with a status report from the machinery deep inside the Quietener. Systems that had been preparing themselves for the last twelve hours were now minutes away from readiness.

The single graph on the wall was just a useful shorthand for the state they were hoping to create; the novo-vacuum itself was the sum of equal parts of forty-eight variations of the target graph, all generated by simple symmetry transformations of the original. All the individual variations favored one direction over another, but the sum combined every possible bias, canceling them all out and giving rise to a perfectly isotropic state. Since none of the graphs could be found in nature, this elegant description was useless as a recipe, but it wasn’t hard to show that the same state vector could also be described by a different sum: forty-eight regions of ordinary vacuum, each slightly curved, oriented in forty-eight different directions.

Inside the Quietener, an asteroid’s-mass worth of helium had been cooled into a Bose-Einstein condensate, and manipulated into a state where it was equally likely to be found in any of forty-eight different places. These alternative locations were distributed across the surface of a sphere six kilometers wide. Ordinary matter — or any kind of matter interacting with the outside world — would have behaved as if each distinct position had already become the sole reality; if a swarm of dust particles wandering by had made themselves part of the system, or if the helium’s behavior en masse had merely hinted at the detailed motion of its own atoms, then that behavior could only have told half the story — the classical half — and all the quantum subtleties would have been lost in the fine print. But the condensate was isolated as scrupulously as any cycling Qusp, and it had been cooled to the point where the states of all its individual atoms were dictated completely by its macroscopic properties. With no hidden complications, inside or out, the result was a quantum-mechanical system the size of a mountain.

The geometry of the vacuum in the Quietener inherited the helium’s multiplicity: its state vector was a sum of the vectors for forty-eight different gravitational fields. Once the condensate’s components had all been nudged into place, the quantum geometry at the center of the sphere would be equivalent to the novo-vacuum, and a new kind of space-time would blossom into existence.

That was the idealized version: a predictable event in a known location. In reality, the outcome remained hostage to countless imperfections and potential intrusions. If the experimenters were lucky, sometime over a period measured in minutes, somewhere over a region measured in meters, a few thousand cubic Planck lengths of novo-vacuum would be created, and survive for an unprecedented six-trillionths of a second.

Yann turned to Cass. "Are you ready to freeze?" The first time he’d asked her this, she’d been almost as nervous as the moment before she’d been transmitted from Earth, but the question had rapidly become a formality. Of course she was ready. That was how things were done. Just a few minutes of numb immobility, watching the data appear on the screen in front of her, and the odds were good that it would be the last time. A five-hour trip back to the station, a day or two of analysis, a brief celebration, and she would depart. Her Earth body, frozen more deeply than this one had ever been, was waiting for her. She’d step across the light-years in a subjective instant, a new set of memories to sweep away the icy cobwebs of her old self.

She said, "No. I’m not ready."

Yann looked alarmed, but only for a moment. Cass suspected that he’d just conferred privately with someone better able to guess what she had in mind. Though the Mimosans didn’t think any more rapidly than she did — running on Qusps themselves, they faced the same computing bottlenecks — they could communicate with each other about five times faster than her own form of speech allowed. That only annoyed her when they used it to talk about her behind her back.

She added dryly, "Tell Rainzi I’ve changed my mind."

Yann smiled, clearly delighted, and then his icon was instantly replaced by Rainzi’s. Fair enough: with the countdown proceeding, the Mimosans had better things to do than fake inertia for its own sake.

Rainzi’s response was more cautious than Yann’s. "Are you certain you want to do this? After everything you told me?"

"I’m the quintessential singleton," Cass replied. "I weigh up all my choices very carefully."

There was no time to spell out in glacial words everything she was feeling, everything that had swayed her. Part of it was the same sense of ownership that had brought her all this distance in the first place: justifiably or not, she didn’t want the Mimosans to have a better view than she did of the thing they were about to create together. There was the same longing for immediacy, too: she would never see, or touch, any graph as it really was, but to remain locked in a body that could only perceive a fraction of the data, milliseconds after the fact, would leave her feeling almost as detached from the event, now, as if she’d stayed on Earth, waiting for the centuries-old news of an experiment conducted light-years away. Every viewpoint was a compromise, but she had to be as close as she could get.

Beyond the experiment itself, though, it was clear to her now that she couldn’t leave Mimosa without doing at least one thing that went against the grain. After five years of monastic restraint, five years of denying herself the dishonest comforts of virtual reality, she was sick of placing that principle above everything else. Beyond the fact that this disembodiment would be entirely in the service of honesty, she needed, very badly, to drag herself out of the absolutist rut she’d been digging from the moment she’d arrived. If she’d compromised a little from the start, maybe she wouldn’t have felt the same sense of desperation. But it was too late now for half-measures. If she returned to Earth unchanged, it wouldn’t be a triumph of integrity. It would be a kind of death. She’d implode into something as hermetic and immutable as a black hole.

All this, weighed against the thing she hated most: lack of control. Every choice she made rendered meaningless. What choices, though? Her clones would run for a few subjective minutes, most of them in rapt attention as the data poured in. What was the worst that one of these transient selves might do? Utter a few unkind words to Livia or Darsono? Disclose some small guilty secret from her past to people who either wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t care, or at the very least, wouldn’t have the chance to reproach her for long? She wasn’t opening up the gates to the old human nightmare: endless varieties of suffering, endless varieties of stupidity, endless varieties of banality. She would diffuse a very small distance into the space of possibilities, and whatever unhappiness she might experience, whatever misdemeanors she might commit, would be erased beyond recovery.

Rainzi looked skeptical, and she couldn’t blame him. But there was no time left for him to play devil’s advocate, to test her resolve. Cass stood her ground, silently, and after a moment he nodded assent.

She felt a stream of low-level requests for data, and she willed her Mediator to respond. She’d been through the same process before her transmission from Earth: sending the preliminaries first, things that needed to be known about the structure of her mind before it could be implemented in a new environment.

Rainzi said, "Take my hand. We’ll step through together." He placed his ghost-fingers over hers, and asked her for everything.

Cass examined his face. It was pure chance that her Mediator had given him an appearance that inspired trust in her, but the faces of the embodied were no better guides to character, whether they’d been sculpted by genes or by their wearer’s wishes. If Rainzi’s eyes still seemed kind to her, after five years, wasn’t that because he’d shown her genuine kindness? This was not the time for paranoid delusions about the unknowable mind behind the mask.

She said, "Are you ever afraid of this, yourself?"

"A little," he admitted.

"What frightens you the most? What is it that you think might happen?"

He shook his head. "There’s no terrible fate that I fear is lying in store for me. But however many times I do this, I come no closer to knowing what it’s actually like. Don’t you think there’s something frightening about that?"

She smiled. "Absolutely." They weren’t so different that she’d be insane to follow him, the way it would be insane to follow an armored robot into a volcano. This would not be strange or painful beyond her power to bear. If she truly wanted it, she had nothing to fear.

Cass opened the floodgates.

Rainzi’s hand passed through her own, intangible as ever. Cass shuddered. She was who she always was, and the part of her who valued that above all else could not disguise its relief.

"Don’t worry," he assured her, "you won’t be hanging around waiting. And you won’t be disappointed. The femtomachine will only start up on a definite signal from the Quietener; if there’s nothing, it won’t ever be run."

Cass protested, "Aren’t you telling the wrong person?" He might have mentioned this before she’d been split.

Rainzi shrugged. "To the clone, it will be self-evident. If it gets the chance to think anything at all."

If the vacuum at the heart of the Quietener changed, her other self would wake, watch the whole event unfold in slow motion, bifurcate a million times, then vanish, before Cass had even noticed the good news. Neither the price nor the payoff were part of her own future, now.

Yet they would all be one person: awake, asleep. The dream she would not remember would be her own.

Here and now, though?

She would have to make do with whatever glimpses she could steal.

She turned to Yann. "Freeze me. One last time."