CHAPTER 11

Naomi went home to her parents’ house with no plans to return to school. She had no plans at all, except to hide away and be alone with her grief. The day of commencement came and went. A few weeks later, a diploma came in the mail, along with a letter from her advisor, saying that at his urging, the requirement for a senior project had been waived. She had been awarded her degree. She didn’t care.

The days and weeks passed interminably. Her home didn’t turn out to be the sanctuary she’d hoped for. She felt trapped there, smothered in her parents’ sadness and well-meaning compassion. They were suffering too, but in a different way. They had lost a child, a future, grandchildren that would never be. Naomi had lost the only person with whom she had ever felt fully comfortable. Her parents grieved with noise and tears and loud arguments. Naomi grieved in silence.

She didn’t want to console her parents, and she didn’t want

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to be consoled by them, either. When they were around, she found herself constantly evaluating what she should do and say. If she didn’t show grief, she felt cold and unfeeling. If she did try to show what she felt, it seemed fake, a façade she was putting on purely for display. She felt watched, and she hated to be watched. Every day was the same. She felt like time had stopped inside the little bubble that was her life. She stood motionless, trapped in a darkness that never changed while the rest of the world passed by in motion and color.

The tragedy drove her mother to religion. She started going to church, to Bible studies, to prayer meetings, and begged Naomi to come with her. The first time, Naomi went along, just to make her mother happy. It caused such a bitter argument with her father when they came home, however, that she never went again.

Her dad was angry at God, or perhaps more accurately, angry at anyone who could believe that God was good. He hated that her mom had turned to faith, and didn’t want her pressuring Naomi to go. More and more, Naomi found herself between them, trying to mediate, or else just hiding away in her room while they fought. They needed help, but she didn’t think it was the kind of help she could provide. She was too close to them. She was the daughter whose experimental tech had killed their other daughter. It made her too much of an emotional flashpoint to defuse anything.

She needed to be alone or, failing that, lost in a crowd of strangers. She loved her parents, and didn’t want them to lose her as well, but eventually, she had to leave. In the final months of school, she had received dozens of recruiting offers from software companies around the world. Without really thinking about it, she interviewed and then accepted a job at a big data analytics firm in downtown Manhattan.

She rented a one-room apartment barely larger than a closet, which felt like the perfect size. She walked streets teeming with strangers, safe in anonymity, as alone as if she were the only person alive. She threw herself into the work, sixty or seventy hours a week, excelling at the job, although the code was tedious and uninspiring. She didn’t want to be inspired. She just wanted to hide.

Although she spoke to her coworkers, she never offered any personal information, never asked about their families, never joined them after work for a drink. She developed a reputation for being talented but cold. She didn’t care. It made no difference to her what they thought.

She ate poorly, sometimes skipping breakfast and lunch altogether, and grabbing dinner most nights at a tiny Indian hole-inthe-wall near her workplace. She hated having to feed and take care of her body. In high school, she’d read a novel by Nancy Kress called Beggars in Spain, in which children were genetically designed not to need sleep. Ever since she’d read it, Naomi had resented the hours she had to waste in bed. Why did she have to turn off her mind—her self—for hours of every day just so her body could sleep? Bodies were weak and fragile. They required food and rest and could be so easily harmed. Even when they were kept safe, they eventually grew old and died. They were prisons for the mind that came with a sentence of death.

But her body wasn’t her. She felt that now more strongly than ever. She, Naomi, was something intangible, something that transcended flesh and bone. Science fiction had taught her that. With the right technology, a mind might be uploaded into a computer, allowing a person to live on without a body. Whether or not such technologies would ever be invented, it was the idea that mattered. The idea that if she were uploaded to a computer, or transplanted into a robot, or swapped into someone else’s body, the result would still be her.

She wondered about the faith her mother had found. The idea that the human mind was like software running on a machine, and thus able to be copied or transferred, far predated the invention of the computer. Christians, after all, believed the same thing, didn’t they? That a person was more than just the body they had lived in. That there was something more central, and longer lasting, than just this package of meat.

She danced around the word soul, since it felt a little too cosmic, but she supposed that was what she meant. She found it hard to accept that the laughter, the love, the beauty, the kindness, the unique thinking mind and heart that was Abby could be so easily snuffed out. If it were true, then life was a trap, a precious goblet in freefall with no hope other than to smash on the pavement below. She was more than just a collection of muscles and blood vessels and nerves, and Abby had been, too.

In the evenings, consumed by these thoughts, she wandered along Broadway, through Times Square, losing herself in the crowds and sounds and brightly lit signs. Only when she was too tired to walk another step did she take the subway back to her apartment and fall into her bed to sleep until morning.

Her weekends she spent at the public library, patting the lions on her way through the doors, then losing herself in classic science fiction until the work week began again. She read Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love and Robert Sawyer’s Mind-scan and David Brin’s Kiln People and Robert Silverberg’s To Live Again. She contemplated immortality and personality and consciousness. But even reading wasn’t the escape it had always been before. She would read some passage or idea that caught her imagination, and she would think: I have to tell Tyler about this one. Then she would remember that Tyler was no longer around, and remember why he was no longer around, and her thoughts would spiral back into sadness.

She really had liked him, but she knew she could never see him again. It was like wearing a necklace after a bad sunburn. It didn’t matter how much you liked the necklace; it just hurt too much to keep it on. She would never be able to look at him again without thinking of Abby lying bleeding and broken in the dirt. Of course, a sunburn eventually healed. She didn’t think this pain ever would.

She continued on like that, day after day, week after week, dulling grief in monotony and busyness, until one day, she received an email from the network administrators at Penn with the subject “Account Expiration Notice”:

Dear Student:

As you are no longer enrolled or employed at the University of Pennsylvania, your computing accounts with the University of Pennsylvania are due to expire in thirty (30) days. If you plan to re-enroll during the coming year, contact our department to extend your time limit. Otherwise, please make every effort, as soon as is convenient, to migrate all personal email or data files to another system.

She had barely thought of Penn. In fact, she had intentionally shielded herself from such memories, surrounding herself with new places and sights and smells. She hadn’t logged on to her Penn account in months. The autocar simulations she never wanted to see again, but they had been little more than a driving course with roads and traffic lights and simple rules anyway. Her true experiments had been the worlds in which her Mikes lived and died. As far as she knew, all of those simulations were still loaded on her cluster. In fact, they were probably still running.

The last time she had worked on that software, she had built the evolutionary algorithm directly into the worlds, so that new Mikes would keep spawning and fighting for resources indefinitely. The months since then would have been like millennia to them—tens of thousands of generations would have spawned and fought and died.

That night, she skipped her usual wandering and returned to her apartment. She lay back on her bed with her glasses and her game console and typed the password to access the cluster of virtual machines allocated to her on the university cloud. After logging in to the game, she was presented with a Realplanet avatar and a view of the sparkling lake and distant mountains of the Mikes’ world. Everything looked much as it had before.

Then she pulled up an info panel to review the details of the world, and discovered the impossible. The original world she’d created covered about a dozen square miles and was limited to a hundred Mikes. It couldn’t be much bigger than that, because the more Mikes she added, and the larger the world, the more computing capacity it required, and her university account was limited to the cluster of virtual machines and associated memory she had available.

The info panel, however, showed that the world had grown a thousandfold. Instead of a dozen square miles, it now covered the equivalent of the area of Maryland. Instead of a hundred Mikes, it now supported a population of ten million.

Ten million. It wasn’t possible. The computing capacity required to manage a simulation of that size would far outstrip her university allotment. Besides, the world was a fixed size. It wasn’t designed to grow larger. Realplanet could handle larger simulations, of course, but only when given the instructions and server capacity to do so. How was this happening?

There was only one explanation, crazy as it sounded. The Mikes had done it. Which meant they were reaching out of the confines of the Realplanet simulation. Somehow, they had evolved to use the tools inside their world to affect things outside of it. The environment to which they were adapting, after all, was not just the simulation but the whole computing system that hosted it. If some Realplanet bug allowed changes to the file system or runtime environment, and exploiting that bug gave them a survival advantage, then given enough time, the Mikes would find it.

It was the power of evolution at work. Over time, any mechanism that improved their ability to produce offspring would survive into the next generation. She didn’t know how they were doing it yet, but she would find out. The real question was, if they could do this, what more could they learn to accomplish?