I couldn’t see Susan’s face. I hoped she was smiling. “I won’t be around to see that.”
I was quiet for a moment; I didn’t know if I really wanted to broach this topic. “But what if there was a way,” I said. “A way to live forever.”
Susan was sharp; that’s one of the reasons I’d married her. “Has Hollus offered you that? Immortality?”
I shook my head. “No. He doesn’t have any better idea of how to make it work than we do. But his race has found evidence of six other species that seem to have perhaps discovered immortality . . . of a sort.”
She shifted slightly against my chest. “Oh?”
“They seem to have . . . well, the word we’ve been using is ‘transcended’ into another level of existence . . . presumably by uploading themselves into computers.”
“That’s hardly ‘living forever.’ You might as well be a corpse preserved in formaldehyde.”
“We presume the uploaded beings continue to exist within the computer, acting and reacting and interacting. Indeed, they might not even be able to tell that they don’t have material existence anymore; the sensory experience might be comparable to, or better than, what we’re used to.”
She sounded incredulous. “And you say whole races have done this?”
“That’s my theory, yes.”
“And you think the individual consciousnesses continue on forever inside the computers?”
“It’s possible.”
“Which means . . . which means you wouldn’t have to die?”
“Well, the flesh-and-blood me would die, of course, and I would have no continuity with the uploaded version once the scan had been made. But the uploaded version would remember having been me, and would go on after I’d died. As far as it — or those interacting with it — would be concerned, it would be me. So, yes, if we had access to the technology, in a very real sense I wouldn’t have to die. I assume that one of the big reasons for people uploading themselves was to overcome the limitations imposed by growing old or ill.”
“This isn’t on the table?” asked Susan. Her heart was pounding; I could feel it. “You really haven’t been offered this?”
“No,” I said. “Neither the Forhilnors nor the Wreeds know how to do it — and, for that matter, we’re only assuming that this is what really happened to the other races. It seems that every intelligent species either destroys itself shortly after discovering nuclear weapons, or that it survives maybe a hundred and fifty years longer, but then decides to transcend.”
Susan lifted her shoulders. “If it were on the table — if it was something you were being offered right now — my response might be different. You know that . . .” She trailed off, but I knew she’d been about to say that she’d do anything to keep from losing me. I squeezed her hand.
“But,” she continued, “if it weren’t for that, if it weren’t for what we’re facing, I’d say no. I can’t imagine it being something I’d want.”
“You’d live forever,” I said.
“No, I’d exist forever. That’s not the same thing.”
“It could all be simulated, of course. Every aspect of life.”
“If it isn’t real,” said Susan, “it isn’t the same.”
“You wouldn’t be able to tell that it wasn’t real.”
“Perhaps not,” Susan said. “But I’d know it wasn’t, and that would make all the difference.”
I shrugged a little. “Ricky seems just as happy playing Nintendo baseball as he is playing the real game — in fact, he plays the computer version more often; I don’t think his generation is going to have the conceptual problems with this that we do.” I paused. “A virtual existence does have its appeals. You wouldn’t have to grow old. You wouldn’t have to die.”
“I like growing and changing.” She frowned. “I mean, sure, I sometimes wish I still had the body I’d had when I was eighteen, but I’m mostly content.”
“Civilization after civilization seems to decide to do this.”
Susan frowned. “You say they either upload themselves or blow themselves up?”
“Apparently. Hollus said his people faced the same sort of nuclear crisis we’re still facing.”
“Maybe they decide they have no choice but to trade reality for a simulation, then. If, say, the U.S. and China were to go to war, we’d all probably die, and the human race would be over. But if this were all a simulation, and things went bad, you could just reset the simulation and go on existing. Maybe unreal existence is the only long-term hope for violent races.”
That was certainly an intriguing thought. Maybe you didn’t outgrow your desire to blow each other up. Maybe it was inevitable that some nation, or some group of terrorists, or just some lunatic, would do it; as Hollus had said, the ability to destroy life on a massive scale becomes cheaper, more portable, and more readily available as time goes by. If there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle — whether it’s nuclear bombs, biological weaponry, or some other tool of mass destruction — then perhaps races transcend just as soon as they can, because it’s the only safe thing to do.
“I wonder what humanity will choose when the time comes?” I said. “Presumably, we’ll have the technology within a century.” No need to state it dramatically; Susan and I were in the same boat on timeframes that long. “You and I won’t live to see it, but Ricky might. I wonder what they will choose to do?”
Susan was quiet for a few moments. She then started shaking her head slowly back and forth. “I’d love for my son to live forever, but . . . but I hope he, and everyone, chooses normal existence.”
I thought about that — about the pain of skinned knees and broken hearts and broken bones; about the risks flesh was susceptible to; about what I’d been going through.
I doubted there was any way to reverse the decision. If you copied whatever you were into a computer, you presumably couldn’t go back. If the biological version of you continued on, it would have a separate existence from the moment the scan was made. There’d be no way to reintegrate the two versions later on; it would be like trying to force identical twins to inhabit a single body.
There were no intelligent lifeforms left on any of those six worlds Hollus’s starship had explored. Perhaps all races terminated the biological versions of themselves once the electronic ones were created. Indeed, perhaps that was the only sensible thing to do, preventing any possibility of terrorist disruptions of the virtual world. Of course, at least on Earth, there were those who would never agree to be voluntarily uploaded — the Amish, Luddites, and others. But they might be scanned surreptitiously, moving them into a virtual world indistinguishable from the one they’d left, rather than leaving any flesh-and-blood beings around whose descendants might vandalize the computers.
I wondered if any of the races that had transcended regretted their decision?
Susan and I got ready for bed. She eventually drifted off to sleep, but I lay awake, staring at the dark ceiling, envying the Wreeds.
Shortly after I’d been diagnosed, I’d walked the few blocks from the ROM to the Chapters flagship store on Bloor Street and had bought Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. She outlined the five stages of coming to terms with death: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance; by my own reckoning I was now well into number five, although there were occasional days on which I felt as though I was still mired in number four. Nonetheless, almost everyone went through the stages in the same sequence. Was it surprising, then, that there were stages whole species went through?
Hunter-gatherer.
Agriculture or animal husbandry.
Metallurgy.
Cities.
Monotheism.
An age of discovery.
An age of reason.
Atomic energy.
Space travel.
An information revolution.
A flirtation with interstellar voyaging.