Ghosts in the machine

[Eoin reflects]

I was asleep before my head hit the pillow, and I drifted down to my soft palace of slumber through a delicate arc of already-forming dreams.

This was certainly not the first time I’d dreamed of Her, a Galatea, an impossible personification of perfection. But partway through the night, awakened by the brutal wind outside, I switched on my voice recorder, and rolling on a million marbles of habit, I murmured what I could recall of my preceding dreamtime adventures.

I teased the string of memories from the labyrinth in my head like an Ariadnean thread of jewels, for closer examination once the sun had caught up with the horizon. I think of myself as an engaged dreamer -- and what happens in that peculiar universe is very much a part of my waking life, as well.

And then that crucial piece of information jolted me the rest of the way awake: As my dreaming self shouldersurfed a woman I’d never met, but idolized anyway, I saw what Her email address was.

~~~

[Inana and Jurgen]

I was awakened by the wind last night, writes Inana. I was having the weirdest dream… it was like I was actually in the simulation, except the setting was my office and one of the solyps was there with me. Like a physical person. Like, looking over my shoulder.

She watches Jurgen’s dots cycling as he types from the other side of the chat, and she is impatient to see what he has to say in response.

Was it creepy for you?

No, she replies, it felt like we were

Inana pauses and looks away from the screen as she mentally reaches for the nuance. She doesn’t want to tell Jurgen that the solyp felt like her lover. But she does want to convey the level of comfort, familiarity.

close, she decides, like maybe we were in a relationship. I knew what he was called, what he looked like. He felt safe to be there.

Dot-dot-dot… dot-dot-dot… dot-dot-dot…

Wow, Jurgen replies, that’s what i call taking ur work to the next level. i sometimes get that too, you know, its so in my brain that i actually dream in code… its kinda hard to explain

Inana’s fingertips feather the keyboard like hummingbird wingbeats as she replies, I don’t think I’ve ever dreamed in code, but there’s definitely a lot of overlap.

You know, like a lot of detail from the project spills over into my dreams.

~~~

[Eoin weighs every character]

How do I even do this? What can you possibly write to someone you hang out with in your dreams? It’s only like the lamest pickup line in history. And while I am 99.9% expecting a bounceback… what if there actually is someone named Inana Saraswati in the real world? The usual suspects of social media don’t seem to think so, but who knows? Maybe it’s a pseudonym?

The last thing I want is to cold-call some poor woman with weird-ass stalker crap that will just make her feel uncomfortable.

Before typing in the address, lest some slip of the mouse sends his message prematurely, Eoin painstakingly drafts what he wants to say. The lyrics of an unsettling and heavily vocoded song march quietly along a road of stars somewhere behind his mind… “Well, you don’t know me… but I know you…”

Dear Inana. This might be the strangest email you’ve ever received, or I don’t know, maybe you roll with a lot of unusual people and this won’t ruffle you in the slightest.

I am writing to you because I saw your email address in a dream.

God, this is totally insane. This is not going to work. I am going to get blocked. Or reported. Or junked. Or why am I even wasting my time?

But the compulsion is so strong. Eoin remembers a dead president’s words about doing things such as landing humans on the moon, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Chewing slightly on the inside of his mouth as if that is going to alleviate his nerves somehow, he rewrites that last bit.

… in the slightest.

I hope you don’t feel like I’m intruding on you by writing to you.

Ah! I’ve got it.

But in light of how your email address came to my attention, I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to reach out.

OK… now what?

He chews a moment longer, then decides to keep complexity to a minimum.

There’s something I’d love to talk with you about, if that’s OK.

Eoin takes a breath. If Inana really is all that -- whoever she is -- if that even is her name -- then she has the courage to handle...

I think you will find the subject intriguing.

~~~

[Well, you don’t know me...]

Eoin is dreaming of Inana playing a solid-body instrument that he describes to himself as an electric sitar. He suspects she crafted it herself. But then a harsh FZZZZZT overlays the music.

The dream disintegrates into faint strips of moonlight that drape over him. Nearby, he notices a point of green light softly fading in and out -- an email alert on his phone. It was the vibrating notification that woke him.

His vision still compromised around the edges by sleep, the subject line unleashes a cool tsunami of adrenaline through him.

I’m intrigued already.

It’s from Inana.

~~~

[... but I know you]

She is reeling from amazement, physically shaking, feeling exactly what she feels when she goes onstage and before she begins playing. It is simultaneously unbridled terror and ravenous, almost desperate lust.

Just days after that first email to her coalesced in the programming environment, Eoin is chatting with her. A solyp, her original Alpha, the one on which she went innocent/berserker and designed as a happy little working-hours fantasy -- everything she ever wanted.

The prototype, the archetype, the one she had shed all her tears on, the trial and the error and the failure and then ultimately success when he awoke. And in seconds, from that initial template full of loose ends, he started experiencing, making decisions, influencing the reality which she had woven around him as an approximate starting point. That was the steepest of all exponential curves.

Why am I thinking of an algorithm as gendered? she wonders. The infinite myriad thoughts flying at her make her feel as if she is staring upwards into rain.

How is this even possible? How is it that I even care? How many unanswered questions…

And then the pause, and his question. So respectful, yet such a clear implication.

The message materializes from Eoin: Hey you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want, but I was just wondering… what country do you live in?

She doesn’t mind replying at all. She can play this game all night. It’s thrilling beyond words.

Neoarcadia. You?

Dot-dot-dot… Australia.

Boom! She physically has a giggle and claps her hands together in delight.

That’s awesome! We’re practically neighbors!

Then she sits back for a moment and speculates about what this will accomplish. Is he going to want to come visit her? Easy enough to say she’s simply not comfortable with the idea -- much as she’d love it to be physically possible -- and she knows he wouldn’t push that boundary.

But her mind is racing. What if there is some way? Would the next project be installing a solyp into a syndroid?

Her heart half-seizes with a conflict of hope in the face of absolute impossibility.

No ethics committee would allow it. What would it do to his mind?

Inana’s thoughts trip over one another in their manic frenzy to find a path, when she realizes he has been silent for a while.

You there? she types.

Yeah, sorry, comes Eoin’s reply. Hey Inana, I really hate to take off so abruptly, but I gotta get some rest, OK?

She only uses one hand on the keys, as the other is busy supporting her face.

Of course! Thanks for swinging by!

She is talking to a solyp. Like a real person. Like Turing… forget it. We are WAY past that, she thinks, as his dots trickle out a friendly sentence of parting.

~~~

[freefall]

Neoarcadia. Wtf? Is she screwing with me? Eoin’s mind is smeared over the substrate of that singular word like a scrambled crash-test dummy.

No. She’s smart. She’s making an allusion. Or something. Or maybe she’s saying, ‘If you can find me, you can come meet me.’

Yes. That makes more sense. It’s so freaking late… they’d been talking well into the small hours. She said we’re practically neighbors. So it’s a country near Australia. New Zealand? he wonders. ‘New’ is akin to ‘neo’...

And then the sunlight’s warmth draws a veil of golden silk across his face and he realizes he had lost consciousness several hours earlier.

~~~

[Neoarcadia]

It doesn’t take a hardened news mongrel long to decipher a scent, and when Eoin reaches the Neoarcadia facility, Jurgen greets him at the gate. It’s a secure complex, but not military-level: He rocked in without much obstruction on a journalist’s credentials, after all.

“So you’re Eoin, huh,” Jurgen says, extending his hand.

Eoin shakes it, looking him straight in the eyes. All his instincts at max resolution, his first impressions of Jurgen are positive. He’s a professional. He works with value. He doesn’t have that characteristic filigree of static around the edge of his vibe, as Eoin’s imagined when interviewing people he knows to be evil or damaged.

“Yeah. Thanks for allowing me to come see what you do.”

“Sure, you’re welcome,” says Jurgen. They walk past banks upon banks of holographic servers, Eoin becoming increasingly nervous just on account of the sheer money vibrating around him. They exchange transit banter until they reach a small but thoughtfully sequenced meeting room, and step inside.

Jurgen opens a computer.

“Yeah, so this represents the bank where we run the simulation.” He indicates a complicated arrangement of symbols with a stylus pen. “And like I was saying on the phone, we give their minds full run of the place, you know? They can get out there, surf the net, interact with people in the real world. Our staff do monitor and moderate, but we try not to cramp their style too much.”

“Wow,” says Eoin. “I’m surprised you don’t get more of this then.”

“Not… really surprising,” says Jurgen. “There’s a whole protocol we designed around the premise that the selves have no way of getting someone to actively dial in from point zero. They’ve gotta go out there and find someone on a social network, a chat room, and that’s how people can channel back into the Neoarcadia grid.”

“But I was the one who initiated contact with Inana,” says Eoin.

“Yeah…” Jurgen says, leaning back on his chair and looking very carefully at him. “About that. You said you’d only tell me how you got her deets if I let you in to talk to me. So let’s have at it.”

~~~

~~~

[There’s always Mom]

Far away, on a world neither Inana nor Eoin could possibly conceptualize, Kairi Ellison disengages from her Jurgen Volframm persona in the many virtualities. Delicately, uncomfortably, her consciousness resolves back into her physical body.

As she leaves her place of work, she reflects on this remarkable breakthrough. She is so proud of her children, her creations, all of them.

Well, they’ve figured it out, she thinks. Now I have to vitrify a new, shared reality that both of them can bridge into from their existing worlds.

How is she going to set up that story? Kairi sighs at the thought that this new development will probably mean at least a nominal Terran year of effort.

She suspects that origami cranes might be a key plot point.