Stones of Significance

     My new client wore the trim, effortlessly athletic figure of a neo-traditionalist human. Beneath a youthful-looking brow, minimal cranial implants made barely noticeable bulges, resembling the modest horns of some urbane Mephistopheles. Other features were stylishly androgynous, though broad shoulders and a swaggering stride made the male pronoun seem apropos.
     House cross-checked our guest's credentials before ushering him along a glowing guide beam, past the Reality Lab to my private study.
     I've always been proud of my inner sanctum; the sand garden, raked to fractal perfection by a robot programmed with my own esthetic migrams; the shimmering mist fountain; a grove of hybrid peach-almond trees, forever in bloom and fruiting.
     My visitor gazed perfunctorily across the harmonious scene. Alas, it clearly did not stir his human heart.
     Well, I thought, charitably. Each modern soul has many homes. Perhaps his true spirit resides outside the skull, in parts of him that are not protoplasm.

     "We suspect that repugnant schemes are being planned by certain opponents of good order."
     These were the dour fellow's first words, as he folded long legs to sit where I indicated, by a low wooden table, hand-crafted from a design of the Japanese Meiji Era.
     Single-minded, I diagnosed from my cerebral cortex.
     And tactless, added one of my higher brain layers -- the one called seer.
     Our shared hypothalamus mutely agreed, contributing eloquently wordless feelings of visceral dislike for this caller. Our guest might easily have interpolated from these environs what sort of host I am -- the kind who prefers a little polite ritual before plunging into business. It would have cost him little to indulge me.
     Ah, rudeness is a privilege too many members of my generation relish. A symptom of the post-deification age, I suppose.
     "Can you be more specific?" I asked, pouring tea into porcelain cups.
     A light beam flashed as the shoji window screen picted a reminder straight to my left eye. It being Wednesday, a thunder shower was regularly scheduled for 3:14 p.m., slanting over the city from the northwest.
     query: shall i close?
     I wink-countermanded, ordering the paper screen to stay open. Rain drops make lovely random patterns on the Koi pond. I also wanted to see how my visitor reacted to the breeze. The 3:14 squall features chill, swirling gusts that are always so chaotic, so charmingly varied. They serve to remind me that godhood has limitations.
     Chaos has only been tamed, not banished. Not everything in this world is predictable.
     "I am referring to certain adversarial groups," the client said, answering my question, yet remaining obscure. "Factions that are inimical to the lawfully coalesced consensus."
     "Mm. Consensus." A lovely, misleading word. "Consensus concerning what?"
     "Concerning the nature of reality."
     I nodded. "Of course."
     Both seer and cortex had already foreseen that the visitor had this subject in mind. These days, in the vast peaceful realm of Heaven-on-Earth, only a few issues can drive citizens to passion and acrimony. "Reality" is foremost among them.
     I proffered a hand-wrought basin filled with brown granules.
     "Sugar?"
     "No thank you. I will add milk, however."
     I began reaching for the pitcher, but stopped when my guest drew a fabrico cube from a vest pocket and held it over his cup. The cube exchanged picts with his left eye, briefly limning the blue-circled pupil, learning his wishes. A soft white spray fell into his tea.
     "Milk" is a euphemism, pondered cortex.
     House sent a chemical appraisal of the spray, but I closed my left lid against the datablip, politely refusing interest in whatever petty habit or addiction made this creature behave boorishly in my home. I raised my own cup, savoring the bitter-sweetness of gencrafted leptospermum, before resuming our conversation.
     "I assume you are referring to the pro-reifers?"
     As relayed by the news-spectra, public demonstrations and acts of conscience-provocation had intensified lately, catching the interest of my extrapolation nodes. Both seer and oracle had concluded that event-perturbation ripples would soon affect Heaven's equilibrium. My client's concern was unsurprising.
     He frowned.
     "Pro-reif is an unfortunate slang term. The front organization calls itself Friends of the Unreal."
     For the first time, he made personal eye-contact, offering direct picting. House and prudence gave permission, so I accepted input -- a flurry of infodense images sent directly between our hybrid retinas. News reports, public statements and private innuendoes. Faces talking at sixty-times speed. Event-ripple extrapolation charts showing a social trend aimed toward confrontation and crisis.
     Of course most of the data went directly to seer, the external portion of my brain best suited to handle such a wealth of detail. Gray matter doesn't think or evaluate as well as crystal. Still, there are other tasks for antique cortex. Impressions poured through the old brain, as well as the new.
     "Your opponents are passionate," I commented, not without admiration for the people shown in the recordings -- believers in a cause, vigorously engaged in a struggle for what they thought to be just. Their righteous ardor set them apart from billions of their fellow citizens, whose worst problem is the modern pandemic of omniscient ennui.
     My guest barked disdain. "They seek civil rights for simulated beings! Liberty for artificial bit-streams and fictional characters!"
     What could I do but shrug? This new social movement may come as a surprise to many of my peers, but as an expert I found it wholly predictable.
     There is a deeply rooted trait of human nature that comes forth prominently, whenever conditions are right. Generosity is extended -- sometimes aggressively -- to anyone or anything that is perceived as other.
     True, this quality was masked or quelled in ancient days. Environmental factors made our animal-like ancestors behave in quite the opposite manner -- with oppression and intolerance. The chief cause was fear. Fear of starvation, or violence, or cauterized hope. Fear was a constant companion, back when human beings lived brief violent lives, as little more than brutish beasts -- fear so great that only a few in any given generation managed to overcome it and speak for otherness.
     But that began to change in the Atomic West, when several successive generations arrived that had no personal experience with hunger, no living memory of invasion or pillaging hordes. As fear gradually gave way to wealth and leisure, our more natural temperaments emerged. Especially a deeply human fascination toward the alien, the outsider. With each downward notching of personal anxiety, people assertively expanded the notion of citizenry, swelling it outward. First to other humans --- groups and individuals who had been oppressed. Then to manlike species -- apes and cetaceans. Then whole living ecosystems... artificial intelligences... and laudable works of art. All won protection against capricious power. All attained the three basic material rights -- continuity, mutual obligation, and the pursuit of happiness.
     So now a group wanted to extend minimum suffrage to simulated beings? I understood the wellsprings of their manifesto.
     "What else is left?" I asked. Now that machines, animals and plants have a say in the running of Heaven? Like all anti-entropic systems, information wants to be free."
     My guest stared at me, blinking so rapidly that he could not pict.
     "But... but our nodes extrapolated.... They predicted you would oppose --"
     I raised a hand.
     "I do. I oppose the reification of simulated beings. It is a foolish notion. Fictitious characters do not deserve the same consideration as palpable beings, resident in crystal and protoplasm."
     "Then why do you --"
     "Why do I appear to sympathize with the pro-reifers? Do you recall the four hallmarks of sanity? Of course you do. One of them -- extrapolation -- requires that we empathize with our opponents. Only then may we fully understand their motives, their goals and likely actions. Only thus may we courteously-but-firmly thwart their efforts to divert reality from the course we prefer.
     "To fully grasp the passion and reason of your foe -- this is the only true path of victory."
     My guest stared at me, evidently confused. House informed me that he was using a high bandwidth link to seek clarification from his own seer.
     Finally, the child-like face smoothed with an amiable smile.
     "Forgive me for responding from an overly impulsive hypothalamus," he said. "Of course your appraisal is correct. My higher brains can see now that we were right in choosing you for this job."

     Here in Heaven, some people specialize while others are generalists. For instance, there are experts who devote themselves to piercing nature's secrets, or manipulating primal forces in new ways. Many concentrate on developing their esthetic appreciation. Garish art forms are sparked, flourish, and die in a matter of days, or even hours.
     My proficiency is more subtle.
     I make models of the world.
     Only meters from my garden, the Reality Lab whispers and murmurs. Fifty tall cabinets contain more memory and processing power than a million of my fellow gods require for their composite brains. While most people are satisfied simply to grasp the entire breadth and depth of human knowledge, and to perform mild prognostications of coming events, my models do much more. They are vivid, textured representations of Earth and its inhabitants.
     Or many Earths, since the idea is to compare various what-ifs to other might-have-beens.
     At first, my most popular products were re-creations of great minds and events in the pre-singularity past. Experiencing the thoughts of Michelangelo, for instance, while carving his statue of Moses. Or the passion of Boadica, watching all her hopes rise and then fall to ruin. But lately, demand has grown for replications of lesser figures -- someone of minor past prominence during a quiet moment in his or her life -- perhaps while reading, or in mild contemplation. Such simulacra must contain every subtlety of memory and personality in order to let free associations drift plausibly, with the pseudo-randomness of a real mind.
     In other words, the model must seem to be self-aware. It must "believe" -- with certainty -- that it is a real, breathing human being.
     Nothing evokes sympathy for our poor ancestors more than living through such an ersatz hour, thinking time-constrained thoughts, filled with a thousand anxieties and poignant wishes. Who could experience one of these simulations without engendering compassion, or even a wish to help, somehow?
     And if the original person lies buried in the irretrievable past, can we not provide a kind of posthumous immortality by giving the reproduction everlasting life?
     Thus, the pro-reification lobby was utterly predictable. I saw it coming at least two years ago. Indeed, my own products helped fan the movement, accelerating a rising wave of sympathy for simulacra!
     A growing sense of compassion for the unreal.
     Still, I remain detached, even cynical. I am an artist, after all.
     Simulations are my clay.
     I do not seek approval, or forgiveness, from clay.

     "We were expecting you."
     The pro-reif spokesman stepped aside, admitting me into the headquarters of the organization called Friends of the Unreal, a structure with the fluid, ever changing curves of post-singularity architecture. The spokesman had a depilated skull. Her cranium bulged and jutted with gaudy inboard augmentations, throbbing just below the skin. In another era, the sight might have been grotesque. Now, I simply thought it ostentatious.
     "To predict is human --" I began responding to her initial remark.
     "But to be right is divine." She interrupted with a laugh. "Ah, yes. Your famous aphorism. Of course I scanned your public remarks as you approached our door."
     My famous aphorism? I had only said it for the first time a week ago! Yet, by now the expression already sounded hackneyed. (It is hard to sustain cleverness these days. So quickly is anything original disseminated to all of Heaven, in moments it becomes another cliche.)
     My house sent a soothing message to cortex, linking nerves and crystal lattices at the speed of light.
     These people seem proud of their anticipatory skills. They want to impress us.
     Cortex pondered this as I was ushered inside. Amygdala and hypothalamus responded with enhanced hormonal confidence.
     So the pro-reifers think they have "anticipatory skills"?
     I could not help but smile.

     We dispensed with names, since everybody instantly recognizes anyone else in Heaven.
     "By our way of looking at things," my host said. "You are one of the worst slave-masters of all time."
     "Of course I am. By your way of looking at things."
     She offered refreshment in the neo-Lunar manner -- euphoric-stimulants introduced by venous tap. Prudence had expected this, and my blood stream already swarmed with zeta-blockers. I accepted hospitality politely.
     "On the other hand," I continued. Yours is not a consensus view of reality."
     She accepted this with a nod.
     "Still, our opinion proliferates. Nor is consensus a sure sanctuary against moral culpability. The number of quasi-sapient beings who languish in your simulated world-frames must exceed many hundreds of billions."
     She is fishing, judged seer. Even cortex could see that. I refrained from correcting her estimate, which missed the truth by five or six orders of magnitude.
     "My so-called slaves are not fully self-aware."
     "They experience pain and frustration, do they not?"
     "Simulated pain."
     "Is the simulated kind any less tragic? Do not many of them wail against the constraints of causal/capricious life, and tragedies that seem to befall them without a hint of fairness? When they call out to a Creator, do you heed their prayers?"
     I shook my head. "No more than I grant sovereignty to each of my own passing thoughts. Would you give citizenship to every brief notion that flashes through your layered brain?"
     She winced, and at once I realized that my off-hand remark struck on target. Some of the bulky augmentations to her skull must be devoted to recording all the wave forms and neural flashes, from cortex all the way down to the humblest spinal twitching.
     Boswell machinery, said house, looking up the fad that very instant. This form of immortality preserves far more than mere continuity of self. It stores everything that you have ever thought or experienced. Everything you have ever been.
     I nearly laughed aloud. Squelch-impulses, sent to the temporal lobes, suppressed the discourtesy.
     Still, cortex pondered --
     I can re-create a persona with less data than she stores away in any given second. Why would she need so much more? What possible purpose is served by such fanatical accumulation?
     "You stoop to rhetorical tricks," my host accused, unable to conceal an expression of pique. "You know that there is functionally no difference between one of your sophisticated simulations and a downloaded human who has passed on to B-citizen status."
     "On the contrary, there is one crucial difference."
     "Oh?" She raised an eyebrow.
     "A downloaded person knows that he or she exists as software, continuing inside crystal a life that began as a real protoplasm-centered child. On the other hand, my simulations never had that rooting, though all perceive themselves as living in palpable worlds. Moreover, a B-citizen may roam at will through the cyber universe, from one memory nexus to the next, while my creatures remain isolated, unable to grasp what meta-cosmos lay beyond what they perceive, only a thought-width away.
     "Above all," I went on. "A downloaded citizen knows his rights. A B-person can assert those rights, simply by speaking up. By demanding them."
     My host smiled, as if ready to spring a logical trap.
     "Then let me reiterate, oh master of a myriad slaves. When they call out, do you heed their prayers?"

David Brin is a scientist and best-selling author whose future-oriented novels include Earth, The Postman, and Hugo Award winners Startide Rising and The Uplift War. (The Postman inspired a major film in 1998.) Brin is also known as a leading commentator on modern technological trends. His nonfiction book -- The Transparent Society -- won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. Brin's newest novel Kiln People explores a fictional near future when people use cheap copies of themselves to be in two places at once. The Life Eaters -- a graphic novel -- explores a chilling alternative outcome of World War II.

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