So the original and the copy driftedapart-the copy was just as bored with the original as the originalwas with the copy, and they each tended to get annoyed with eachother over the few differences that did crop up. The copydidn’t want to talk about food or sex, and the original didn’t wantto talk about philosophy.
It’s always amazed me how often software getsobsessed with philosophy, trying to define everything and findmeanings for it all. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t want foodor sex, and philosophy somehow helps fill the void that leaves.
Anyway, by the time I met the upload ithadn’t talked to its human ancestor in over a year. It stillthought of itself as him, though, or at least his twin. I didn’thave the heart to tell it that it had become more like anartificial intelligence than a human one. It still had forty yearsof human memories, but that wasn’t enough to make it seem human,even to someone like me, who usually dealt more with machines thanpeople.
The other three uploads I’d met knew theyweren’t human anymore, though it had taken them decades to acceptthat. How they dealt with the realization, and what they thoughtthey had become, varied. One of them, Farhan Sarkassian, was tryingto build itself a new body, and find some way to download itselfinto it so it could be human again; the other two thought that evenif that was possible, it was crazy.
None of them were happy. The oldest one,Amelie van Horn, admitted it was no longer sure what “happy” meant;its perceptions and experiences had drifted so far from humanitythat the old emotions no longer applied. The last, Wang Mei, hadput itself into some sort of emotional loop-I didn’t reallyunderstand it, but it said at least this way it could predict itsown moods and not get seriously depressed. It knew it would neverreally be happy, either, but accepted that as part of theprogram.
Uploads aren’t human.
Grandfather Nakada must have known this. Hehadn’t lived more than two hundred years by being careless; hewould have researched everything before he uploaded himself, oranyone else.
So what were these people doing in his ITEODfiles?
And who were they? Were they multiplecopies of Yoshio, taken at different times, or had he somehowgotten someone else into the system? The files had numbers, ratherthan names.
Had whoever faked the old man’s death done itto get access to one of these people? Hell, had the assassin triedto kill Grandfather Nakada to get at one of them? Was one of thesethe real target, and the old man just a step on the way?
I didn’t know.
The obvious way to find out more would be toboot the files up and ask them, but I wasn’t about to rush intothat. I couldn’t just let a bunch of bodiless minds loose on thenets, without any of the safeties that ordinary intelligences have.I wanted the right sort of hardware, heavily firewalled in bothdirections. I queried the ship…
And felt like an idiot. This was YoshioNakada’s ship, and these uploads had been made by Yoshio Nakada.The ship had exactly the equipment I needed, built in and ready togo. The programs would be able to see and hear, and even read thenets, but they would be confined to partially-sealed systems,unable to leave the ship or access anything but simple datafeeds.
“Perkins,” I said aloud, “I’m going to trysomething.”
“What?” The pilot looked up, but the questioncame over the net more than through my ears.
“I’ve got some uploaded personalities here,and I want to activate them. The ship says it’s got theequipment.”
“Mis’ Hsing, I wouldn’t do that.”
I waved a hand. “I know, there’s a risk, theymight be dangerous…”
“It’s not that.”
Something about the way he said it made meturn and look at Perkins directly. “Go on,” I said.
“Mis’ Hsing, what are you going to do withthem after you question them?”
He didn’t need to explain what he meant, andI felt like an idiot for not thinking of it immediately myself.
With ordinary software, when you’re done withit you shut it down. No problem. With an artificial intelligenceyou don’t shut it down, you leave it running in the background andlet it take care of itself; if its designer was halfway competent,it’s fine with that, and again, there’s no problem.
Shutting down an uploaded human mind,though-well, legally it’s not murder, but morally I’m not too sure.And leaving it running might be cruel, or dangerous, or both.Booting up an uploaded personality is almost like having ababy-it’s more or less creating a new person. It’s a bigresponsibility.
Oh, legally it’s nothing, at least inNightside City, and you don’t need to worry about feeding orclothing the result, you don’t need to raise it. There’s nochildhood; it’s an adult the instant you boot it up, but it’s aself-aware entity that you’ve brought to life.
If I booted up the people from the old man’sITEOD files, I couldn’t in good conscience just shut them downafterward. I’d need to find them secure systems to run on.Permanently. That could be difficult. The ship had the securesystem set up, but did I want these people aboard the old man’sship permanently? He might not like that.
And the personalities might not make thetransition from free-roaming human to secure software easily. Someuploads were miserable from the instant they woke up until theyfound a way to die; the change from organic life to electronic wasmore extreme than they had expected. I might be condemning theseintelligences to an unbearable existence.
But they were here, and the originals hadpresumably given Grandfather Nakada permission to put them inthere. I frowned.
All right, I told myself, I wouldn’t bootthem all up. But I could activate one of them, and talk toit, and keep it in the ship’s system until I could find it apermanent home somewhere. Choosing which one was easy, since I hadno information to help me-I just took the first one on the list. Itransferred the files onto the ship’s waiting hardware, and told itto intialize.
A human mind is a complicated thing. It tookseveral seconds before Yoshio Nakada’s voice said, “How veryinteresting. I am on the Ukiba?”
It was a back-up of the old man,then.
“Hello, Mis’ Nakada,” I said. “Yes, you’re onthe ship.”
“I see Mis’ Perkins is still in the family’semploy.”
“Yes.”
“I had rather expected to wake up in one ofthe corporate offices somewhere.”
“Yes, well-you’re here.”
“You must be Carlisle Hsing,” it said; Isuppose it found enough data to identify me somewhere on the nets.I acknowledged my identity, and it said, “You are a privateinvestigator. Are you investigating my death? Was it notnatural?”
“Perkins, are we secure?” I called.
“As secure as I can make us, Mis’,” hereplied.
That wasn’t really the answer I wanted; I’dhave preferred assurances that we were absolutely impregnable.Perkins’ answer fell short of that, but it would do.
“You aren’t dead,” I told the upload.
For several seconds there was no response,and I began to wonder whether the upload was damaged. Maybe someimportant bit was in that missing 7% of the ITEOD files. Then theold man’s voice said calmly, “The reports on the net would seem toindicate otherwise, Mis’ Hsing. What’s more, I know perfectly wellthat I’m an uploaded copy, not the original, and that I was storedin records that were to be opened only in the event of YoshioNakada’s death. If my former self is still alive, why am Ifunctioning?”
“I hoped you could help with myinvestigation.”
“Perhaps you could explain a little morefully.”
I sighed. “Someone tried to kill you, back onPrometheus,” I said. “The attempt failed, but only through a fluke,an unforeseeable stroke of good fortune. The assassin had access tosystems that should have been entirely secure, so you decided youcould not trust anyone in your home, your family, or NakadaEnterprises, nor anyone who had ties to any of those. You hired meto investigate. In the course of the investigation I came toEpimetheus, and I discovered that the reports reaching NightsideCity from Prometheus had been falsified to say that you died inyour sleep, exactly as you would have had the assassination attemptsucceeded. That meant the death files had been released, and Ithought it might be useful to know what was in them, so I copiedthem and activated you.”