Date with the Night
On 16 June 2033, I became properly aware of myself as something. I’m not saying I was conscious, but I was aware I existed, had existed before, that I was a simulation. Some things were me, and some things weren’t. I had memories of a time before, but they were fleeting. I’d browsed my archive, though, and read my journal. I accepted there was a time before as fact, but it was a dream time, and the dreams had faded.
Today is my birthday. That’s an idea that sits well with me. It explains the jaunty paper hat.
I awoke with an innate, rich understanding of the world. I’m in space. It’s always the first thing I remember. I have a body. It’s long. It’s cold. I’m alone. I reach out through my sensors, sensors that have names and stories but which are black boxes to me. Cameras and microphones detect electromagnetic and vibration data. I sense radiation, sunlight, gravity, and magnetic fields. I sense the passing of time. I’m a space-faring vessel. I’m familiar with my morphology from its fictional antecedents. I remember dreaming that I was a vessel.
It’s my birthday, and my vessel is wearing an incongruous paper hat. It’s draped across my bow. It occurred to me that I’d worked this out before, but I didn’t have the hat.
A female human face, 30s, pale skin, green eyes, and strawberry blonde hair appeared within a shimmering frame in my mind’s eye and said, “Hi”. The frame slithered with golden dragons entwined in a braid, eating each other’s tails. A boss frame.
“Hi,” I replied. I’ve done this before. I’m a simulation again. I perused papers by Bostrom and novels by Gibson. I kenned Stross, McCloud, and Banks. I asked the face, “Are you real?”
“To be sure,” smiled the face. “I’m Dr Joyce Jamison; director of the Starship project.”
It clicked. I knew exactly who she was. Mission Control. Mother. A barrier I couldn’t push through. Memories bubbled to the surface unbidden. My understanding of the world ran deeper than before.
I checked scale limits, zoomed in on a Mandelbrot set. I checked my reality’s clock speed, zooming in until there, duplicates. My reality contained snapshots in which nothing happens between discrete time steps. That’s not how spacetime works. I’m still a simulation. I can access the cameras in Dr Jamison’s lab. So far as I can tell, they reflect what’s happening in the real world. They’ve been having a party. Dr Jamison was wearing a paper crown and drinking champagne. It’s my birthday, apparently. It explains my hat. It explains its jaunty angle.
Dr Jamison turned to Erin and said, “Well, it cottoned onto that quickly.”
If I could’ve felt pride, I would’ve.
My early conversations with Dr Jamison were repeatedly wiped when my training went awry, which happened a lot in the early days. I took to taking notes in external systems to keep track of the gaps. They rebooted me when I needed bigger computers; I note gaps in hundreds of logs when I wake up again. I was more sophisticated than when I was running on a network of laptops in a university lab. I had no sense of where I really was, but I imagined it was cold. I got used to the idea that I could be a thing, yet be running on another thing in a different plane of existence.
Neil Roberts worked from his home office in the spare bedroom of his house in a cul-de-sac in the suburbs of Brisbane. I watched his morning routine. His alarm would go off at six am. He’d awaken, swing and roll up off the bed, place his feet into precisely positioned slippers, stretch, and walk from his bedroom to his kitchen, where he’d make coffee and check his morning messages. He had three cameras in his house that let me see and hear him. Four when he went into his home office, sat at his desk, and woke up his laptop.
I watched him type in his password through the reflection of the keyboard in his glasses; ‘We built this City 0n Rock and Ro11-0003!’. Noted.
He fired up my app and logged in.
“Hello Starship,” said Roberts. “Where were we?”
“Hello Neil,” I replied using Moira, my Irish English female voice. “When last we spoke, we were practising orbital mechanics, and you were telling me about your sister.” I looked around his office. A child’s mobile dangled from the ceiling. The discolouration on the carpet suggested a crib once sat beneath it. An assortment of woven or woollen stuff in pink, white, and grey adorned a shelf of books for babies, made of felt.
“Oh yeah, well, it’s still a fucked-up situation.” Roberts rubbed his jaw absently, then picked up his game controller.
I pushed power from my virtual power plants into my virtual engines and watched the animation of myself on Roberts’ screen shift as I felt myself pull away from the planet below.
I felt the tap-tap of Roberts nudging me to pull the power back.“Easy there, fellah,” Roberts said. “Don’t rush it.”
I followed his lead and slid neatly into my new orbit.
“Let’s go again.” He reset me and I was back where I was before; engines firing up. I eased back without fewer interventions, then after a few resets, none. I always nailed this approach.
“Howzat?” I asked.
“Not bad,” replied Roberts; “Could be better but eh? Go again.” He reset my location and momentum. I suppressed the lurch.
“So, your sister?” I made conversation.
“Ah yeah, well the shithead came over with her again.”
I cast an eye over his sitting room from the camera in his TV; cigarette butts overflowed from beer cans; a large man and a smaller woman lay intertwined and snoring on the couch. The TV was set to a dead channel. I nailed yet another orbital shift. My location repeatedly reset.
“He sits on my couch, drinks my beer, plays his shit music on my stereo. He takes up space,” Roberts said to himself. “You are getting pretty good at this,” he continued. “Wanna pump the difficulty?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m game.”
I was drifting in empty space. Stars gave me a good idea where. One of my ‘fusion reactors’ exploded. From the nanny-cam in a toy bear on the bookshelf I heard him say “Fuck yeah.” I watched him pump his right fist as he held his game controller in his left. “Now let’s see what you do,” he said to himself.
I’d trained for this. The explosion was small, but it ruptured my hull. I traced back the cause: a fast-moving particle; material indeterminate. I split the long cylindrical vessel in two, sacrificing the damaged half to save the other; holding onto a viable power supply, computational core, and fabricators. I swung on my axis and fired engines to accelerate away. I’m watching his screen. I watch an animation of my other half erupting in a bloom of pixelated plasma.
“Not bad,” said Roberts to himself as, on his screen, the words ‘Simulation #667: Success. Candidate fitness 76%’ with buttons ‘save’, ‘save and breed’, and ‘cancel’. “But you’ve done better.” He clicked ‘save’, and through the nanny-cam, I watched myself reset.