South of Maya - Fourth Chapter

IV

 

“The life of this world is but comfort of illusion.”

Qur’an 3.185

       Witch waved Mann into a windowless conference room that glowed with harsh fluorescent lighting.  She was surprisingly attractive at first glance, blonde hair falling down over her shoulders, body tapered by a daily jogging regimen, Nordic blue eyes...  But the more your eyes were drawn to the tense mouth, the more you heard her speak, the more she resembled, to Mann’s eye, a medusa. 

       Witch deferred to him at the doorway, as three older men instantly halted their conversation at the far side of a long mahogany table.  Mann took the limp hand of Dr. Westerly, looking deeply into a face so pale you wondered if his skin had ever come in contact with sunlight.  His body looked as shapeless as bread dough under the loose laboratory robe, and the mouth turned downward, making him look at once habitually amazed and disconcerted.  His eyes sought Mann’s and turned away again, as if eye contact were somehow painful.

       “So, what do you think of the simulation?” Westerly inquired.

       “Quite a remarkable experience.  I’ve never been a god before.”

       Westerly nodded as if he already knew the words before they came out of Mann’s mouth, and Mann raised his already high estimate of the man’s intelligence.  Westerly seemed genuinely grateful for the polite response.  In the tentative expression on his face, Mann saw a childhood of endless humiliations from older, stronger, cruder boys whose brutal treatment imposed on Westerly a self-image he would carry for the rest of his life--which gave him a genuine modesty that automatically, habitually self-referred to his weaknesses rather than his strengths. 

       Like an abused animal, Westerly was grateful for any non-hostile interactions.  Mann found himself regarding those timid eyes, wondering how such a person could have succeeded so well at two jobs, particularly when the lesser of them involved a Pulitzer Prize in literature.

       “Call me Pudge,” Westerly said with a hopeful smile as he sat down.

       Hari Gandhi, the table in front of him littered with candy wrappers, waved at him vaguely without rising from his chair.  He regarded Mann with a formidable intelligence blazing out of his heavily-lidded eyes.  He wore his box on his sleeve: a conviction that laziness was a virtue, that it was wasteful and therefore unintelligent to exert any more energy than you had to.  His aversion to work had undoubtedly been a major asset in his career, because it motivated him to constantly search for more efficient ways of getting his work done.

       Mann kept his gaze on the other man, which eventually forced a reluctant verbal response out of him.

       “I am looking forward to being extremely honored to meet you,” Gandhi said.  “Once I am told why you are here.”

       The other member of the team, Aldus Washington, regarded Mann solemnly and with frank disapproval.  His long sepulchral face showed the bone pressing up against the sallow skin with no intermediary fat, like treeless hills where the underlying terrain was nakedly visible.  His head was crowned with a high hairless forehead that bulged slightly forward, as if the brains inside were applying so much pressure that they had managed to press the bone into deformity.

       Looking into his face, Mann saw himself reflected back not as a fellow human, but as a source of future errors and complications not yet known which would inevitably have to be cleaned up.  Inside Washington’s box, he was in the habit of blaming himself for whatever problem he was here to fix, irrespective of whether or not it had been out of his control from the beginning.  The habit of self-blame dragged his self-esteem down notch after notch, until, over thousands of turns of this particular screw, he could now measure it in negative numbers. 

       Yet the fact that he was in the room suggested that Witch trusted his competence, and probably also enjoyed his subservience.

       Washington took Mann’s hand limply with no visible enthusiasm.  “Welcome to the team,” he said, and immediately turned his attention back to Witch.  “I want to go on record as saying that the situation in the simulation has already moved beyond the critical point,” he said.  “Even if we got in there this instant, it would take a miracle to prevent the blowup.”

       “Blowup?” Mann said.

       “Suppose I told you that I know what I’m doing.” Witch said with a look of smug annoyance--a combination that Mann had never seen on anyone’s face before.

       “I am thinking that I would have a very hard time believing you this particular time,” Gandhi said with a light Indian accent.  “As promising as this iteration has been so far, I really am thinking to myself that we need to move on.”

       Witch pulled her mouth tighter.  She touched the tablet on the table in front of her.  “Remember when Russia finally pulled out of Crimea?” she said.

       Mann looked up, startled.  He glanced over at the tablet.  Who was he dealing with?

       “What would you have done if you were the U.S. policymakers, and you wanted to bring about that outcome?” Witch continued.

       “I would have waited until exactly what happened, happened,” Washington answered promptly.  “A popular uprising, suicide bombers costing the Russian military billions of dollars, too expensive to continue the occupation.”  He shrugged his shoulders.

       “Remember how suddenly it happened?” Witch said.  “Suppose, hypothetically speaking, of course,” she said with a glance at Mann, “that the agency sent a single operative, who swam ashore near Krasnoperekopsk two weeks before the first suicide attack, who, recruiting a local hypnotist, planned and executed every one of the 59 suicide attacks on military bases, and that every one of those was actually carried out by trusted Russian soldiers.”

       Washington looked sideways at Mann.  “This is purely hypothetical, right?”

       “You better believe it is,” said Mann, pulling out his phone.  “If it was true, that kind of information can get you killed by either side.”

       Witch scrolled across her screen.  “Suppose he arrived in Latvia four days before the uprising there--”

       Suddenly she bolted upright, as the words on the screen scrambled and then vanished.  She touched the screen, called up another program, scrolled around with a frown, and finally looked over, not quite meeting Mann’s level eyes.

       “The virus has already found and eliminated anything related to certain files you have no business having access to,” Mann told her in a low voice.  “It’s possible I just saved your life.”

       Witch stared at the tablet for a second, and then attempted a ghastly smile.

       “Those files only existed for recruiting purposes,” she said, pushing the tablet aside.  “I’m beginning,” she said, her voice sounding intrigued, “to think we chose well.”

       “I’m looking forward to learning why.”

       Mann found that Gandhi was still staring in his direction.  There was something in the eyes...  Arrogance?  Contempt?  A sense of superiority that made Mann feel like a virus under a microscope.  Gandhi smiled encouragingly, but the smile never touched his eyes.  Mann’s whole body went tense.

       “Perhaps we should explain why we asked you here,” Witch continued.  She nodded toward the chief engineer, and seemed irritated that he didn’t speak up at once. 

       “We’re in the business of harvesting technology,” Washington broke into the awkward silence, “from simulated civilizations that we create in the lab, which"we hope"will become more advanced than ours.”

       “A simulated--”

       Westerly found his voice.  “It was really an accident,” he said with a dry chuckle.  “At Stanford, I was working on simulations of planet formation, and of course the goal was to get ever-more-exact estimates of the dynamics in the molecular cloud that formed the proto-solar system, and so after maybe two years of simulating the aftermath of supernova explosions using a series of Bettman-Clomering regressions that--”

       “Pudge,” Witch said with a withering stare.

       The engineer glanced up sheepishly.  “What I mean is, after maybe a hundred thousand incremental iterations, I managed to get some really accurate simulations going, “accurate” meaning that I was producing planetary formations very close to what we actually see in our own and, so far as we have been able to observe, other solar systems.  One of them I kind of forgot to shut down when I was finished.  It was really amusing when you think about it,” he added.

       Westerly looked around hopefully, and ultimately fruitlessly, for signs of amusement around the table.  He gave a slight shrug of his shoulders. 

       “The simulation was still running when I got back from vacation,” he continued, “which corresponded to something over two point four zero six one billion years, with I would say a margin of error of no more than point zero zero zero zero four percent, because I’m not sure whether or not I looked at it before or after I had my morning coffee--”

       “Pudge.”

       “Yes, well, anyway, before I erased it,” Westerly continued hastily, “I decided to check and see what the planets looked like a couple of billion years after they had coalesced and found their proper places in the gravitational matrix.  When I looked more closely at the third planet, thinking that maybe I could do some analyses of continental drift, erosion patterns, that sort of thing, lo and behold, what do you think I found?”

       Mann waited expectantly.  And waited, as Westerly looked at him expectantly.

       “Pudge!”

       “Oxygen,” Westerly said.

       “Oxygen?” Mann repeated.

       “The atmosphere had an oxygen ratio that was outside of my expected tolerances by eight hundred and ninety four point--that is,” he said, glancing in Witch’s direction--“that is, I could see that something else was going on there that I hadn’t factored in.  That’s when I saw it.”

       Westerly looked at Mann expectantly.

       “Saw what?” he said finally.

       “Life.”

       Mann looked around at the others.  “Like the simulation I worked on?”

       “Oh, it was many orders of magnitude more sophisticated than your training simulation, and that wasn’t even close to what we’re working with now,” Westerly assured him.  “But inside that original simulation, I had recreated the conditions, including all the physics and the physical interactions and all the individual material components that you would find in our own reality, and the computer simply took them all to their logical conclusion.  The very primitive chemoautrophs living--if you can call it that--in the shallow pools of water had evolved into photosynthesizing cyanobacteria spitting out oxygen as a metabolic waste product at an approximate rate of--that is,” he said, glancing up at Witch, “at a rate fast enough to have depleted the iron in the oceans and allowed a buildup of oxygen in the atmosphere.”

       “Are you saying that those creatures were alive?” Mann persisted.

       “Oh mercy no.  What I’m saying is the electronic representations of the individual molecules that made up the electronic representations of those cyanobacteria inside the system were experiencing the electronic representations of changes in temperature and light from day to night, from season to season.  They were experiencing the electronic representation of the salinity of the water and the iron precipitating out--and, quite interestingly, 1,000 foot tides due to the proximity of the electronic representation of a moon much closer to the planet than our Moon is today.” 

       “Even so,” Washington interrupted impatiently, “if you had entered the simulation, you would have felt the wind on your face, and your toes would have felt wet if they happened to splash in the shallow puddles, and the protocreatures would have died if you happened to step on them.

       “The bottom line,” Washington added, “is that Pudge saw an interesting possibility in this, and started our little company to explore them.  He reasoned that if the evolution were allowed to continue for a few more years--”

       “A few BILLION more years,” Westerly interjected.  “At least two point four six--”

       “A few billion more years,” Washington corrected himself with a meaningful look at Westerly, “then the evolutionary process would, sooner or later, produce intelligent life forms.  And since the internal time within the simulation can be adjusted so that seconds are eons, we could let them evolve their civilization to a point beyond our current timeline, see what new technological innovations they invent, and then reproduce them here in our own world.”

       Gandhi was watching Mann closely with heavy-lidded eyes.  “Try to imagine that you are one of those venture capitalist fellows,” he said, “and you have access to new innovations that nobody has ever thought of before, that have not only been tested, and vetted, but have already become commercially viable in a society much like ours.  Imagine knowing the final specifications and design right from the start, and also the impact on society.”

       “Our little universe in a box would become,” Washington interrupted, “the greatest innovation factory in history.”

       Mann stopped to consider the implications.  They extended out of sight and over the horizon.

       “What have you gotten so far?” he asked.

       “Remember when you could suddenly buy holographic movies?” said Westerly. “Or the new explosive devices that the army is experimenting with?”

       “You created those?”

       “We found those technologies in prior simulations,” said Westerly.  “We copied them, and lo and behold, they worked in this reality just like they did in the box.”

       Mann sat back.  He looked up at Witch, and caught something in her eyes, a mesmerizing contempt, an assumption of superiority. 

       What magical trump card was she holding, that gave her such confidence?  It was an interesting puzzle that he put aside for now.

       “So what do you need me for?” Mann asked with genuine curiosity.  “It looks to me like you have the keys to the kingdom.”

       The engineers looked at each other.  None of them seemed to want to be the first to speak.

       “There is just one small, minor insignificant problem,” Gandhi said quietly.  “It unfortunately seems that we can only get so far with these simulations, and then”"he made a gesture with his hands" “the experiment is over and done completely.” 

       “Over?”

       “We’ve created 89 universes so far,” Westerly put in.  “All of them were functioning perfectly as far as anybody could tell.  Eighteen of them never produced a truly intelligent life form; the planet’s ecology was dominated in the end by creatures whose most significant survival trait was either strength, ferocity or reproductive efficiency, including one where the plants eventually ate all the animals.”

       “Must have been interesting to watch.”

       “Nine of our worlds-in-a-box produced highly-intelligent species which eventually settled into an agrarian lifestyle, and sought nothing more than peace and contentment and contemplation,” Washington added.  “After the equivalent of tens of thousands of years, we terminated those experiments as ultimately worthless.”

       “That leaves 62,” Mann said.  “Are you telling me that out of 62 universes, you’ve only managed to get two significant innovations?”

       “Oh, we’ve gotten a lot more than that,” Westerly hurried to interject.  “New ceramics, advances in lattice metallurgy, incalculable advances in understanding the potential for evolutionary development, an improvement here and there in our transportation technologies.  In fact, I believe you rode in one of our vehicles on the way here.  We’ve given our country’s defense department at least two dozen weapons innovations, which is why they’ve taken over as our primary funding source,” he added with a nod toward Witch.

       “Crumbs off the table,” Witch interjected.  “Over and over again, just as we think we’re about to get a look at the technologies that the human species will stumble onto a hundred or a thousand years in the future, the same thing happens.  Over and over again.”

       “What?”

       “The intelligent civilizations, which seem outwardly to be very different from each other, have all, every one, fallen into increasingly destructive bouts of armed conflict,” Witch replied with visible distaste, “which eventually leads to a war that wipes out the experiment.  In one case, thanks to a breakthrough in technology that I dearly wish we could have captured, the simulated battle, conducted entirely by creatures composed entirely of electrical impulses on an array of computer chips, somehow melted the computer and a good piece of the flooring under it.”

       “It was actually quite surprising and rather messy,” Westerly added with a dry chuckle.  “We’re still trying to figure that one out.”

       Mann considered the implications.  “Every time?” he said finally.

       The others all nodded in unison.

       Witch leaned forward on her elbows with visible impatience, her mouth so tight it looked as if it might rip her face apart.

       “You,” she said, “are going to enter a simulated world and live in a time and place that we estimate to be roughly 150 years more advanced than the world you see around you, at least in terms of their technology.  It’s our most promising simulation yet, and our models tell us that it will be blasted back to their stone age in another decade, perhaps sooner.  At no time will you be in real danger, because if you were to die down… there, you would instantly return to your physical body here, and we would send you back immediately so that you could continue your work.  Do you understand what I’ve said so far?”

       Mann nodded.

       “Our two scientists are going to accompany you, and do what they have always done: try to delay the inevitable as long as possible, in this case until what we believe are some very promising innovations can be… harvested.”

       “Are they human"the people living inside the box?” Mann asked.

       “Yes,” Westerly said.

       “Do you have a plan in mind for accomplishing this thing?”

       “We indeed do have a very interesting unworkable plan,” said Gandhi.  “My brother Washington and I are going to do exactly what we always do, which I think is doomed to failure in this particular case.  But we have no idea what your role is going to be,” he added.  “That will be totally up to you, to invent some creative strategies to succeed where failure seems to be a completely certain thing to happen.”

       “If I decide to do this,” said Mann.

       “I believe you signed the contract,” said Witch.  “And in any case, isn’t saving the world what you’re up to these days?”

       Mann looked around the table from one to the other. 

       “How soon do I start?” he said.