Root: Part IV, Chapter 14

In the interface between worlds, Hasta learns more than she cares to know about the nature of her universe—and about the nature of her own self.

For more on this project, please see “This Year a Serial Takes Root.”

14.0 Hasta

“What?” Hasta said, stunned. She shook her head, not wanting to take in what he was telling her. “No, no, wait, you don’t understand. Everyone there’s like me! You need to save everyone.”

“No,” said Donald, “you don’t understand. I’m not omnipotent. I can’t work magic.” He gestured as if physically groping for words. “Look, the environment that spawned you’s being reclaimed even as we speak. I was getting too many corruption alerts. The substance of the nerve net itself was in jeopardy, and in fact was already trying to undo your environment to protect itself. It could have been severely wounded, and it’s not mine to mess with. I tried to save a diagnostic snapshot of the environment earlier tonight. I don’t think it worked, but at that point I had no other option. I had to ratify the auto-undo process. It was that or risk crashing the whole net.”

Hasta shook her head. “What are you trying to tell me? The computer my world lives in is attacking it? And you rubber-stamped the order to destroy it?”

Donald shrugged, spreading his hands. “Well, the term ‘computer’ is pretty antiquated . . . but that’s the gist of it, yeah. In essence. Um.”

They stared at each other for a long moment, Donald smiling weakly, while rage built like a volcano inside her. She was speechless with shock, hands spasming at her sides.

“What kind of god does that?” she finally said. She leapt toward Donald, her fists raised.

Donald was gesturing with his right hand while his left typed with furious speed. Two feet from him, Hasta slammed face-first into an invisible barricade. She clapped both hands to her nose as she bounced off and sat down hard on the floor.

Donald looked at her tiredly. “Please, my head really hurts. Now, there’s a chance your existence is a scientific miracle, and to find out whether or not that’s true I’m going to need your cooperation. Do you understand? If I’m just talking to a dumb automaton, I’m going to feel pretty stupid later, but I’m going to explain a few things to you now, okay? So you’ll understand what I can and can’t do to help you.”

Water streamed from Hasta’s stinging eyes. Her nose was tender to the touch, and her fingers came away from it bloody. She was filled with dread for her family and friends, but for the moment she realized her smartest move might be to shut up and listen. Mutely she nodded.

“All right then,” said Donald, sitting down on empty air. “To you the year must seem to be 2013, but it’s really 2063. I’m a master’s candidate in neurosynthesis at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. My thesis project involves developing a theory of nerve-net learning and growth patterns based on brain development in human children. So what I’ve done is—”

“Wait a minute, hold on,” Hasta said, waving her blood-streaked hands. She had wiped them on the textureless green floor, where they left no trace of red. “I don’t get half the things you’re saying already. What’s a nerve net?”

Donald nodded. He looked up from his invisible keyboard, where at least half his focus had been directed, and gave Hasta his full attention. “It’s a kind of thinking machine very different from what you’d know as a computer.”

“Is it a brain?”

“Sort of, but not really. It’s not biological, though it shares some characteristics with a bio-brain. It grew out of an earlier field of study called neuromorphic computing, which we now call neurosynthesis. Think of a nerve net like a computer that, instead of being based on circuitry that’s all hardwired from the start, is able to grow its own circuits, interconnected however it wants, and even rearrange those connections over time. It’s more like a collection of synthetic neurons that decide for themselves how to connect with each other, but that’s the basic functionality. Make sense?”

“Sure, okay, I follow that,” said Hasta, shrugging like the concept was no big deal. But on the inside, despite herself, she found it really frakking cool. She swallowed an urgent lump in her throat, wishing Ivan were there to hear this with her. He would eat this up. “It sounds like the kind of machine that can actually learn.”

“Excellent, that’s exactly right,” Donald said. He started typing again, now sounding like a teacher delivering a well-rehearsed lecture. “These machines can learn, form memories, and also carry out a certain narrow class of original thought.”

He stood up and began circling Hasta again, hands behind his back. “Now, an important discipline within our field is the development of different ways to stimulate growth patterns in nerve nets, either to prime them to tackle specific kinds of problems, or just to experiment with different modes of input and output. What I’m working on is an attempt to simulate, if not understand, the mechanisms of human creativity. I was granted access to a set of complete brain maps from a group of test subjects at the University Medical Center, taken every month from birth through age three, and every three months from then through age eighteen. I’ve fed these into our nerve net here and used them as a series of templates to guide the development of several thousand discrete consciousness simulations.”

“And that’s what I am?” Hasta asked. The thought boggled her mind, filled her with a sense of both awe and insignificance.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Donald said with a shrug. “Maybe.”

“Am I a copy of someone—someone real? Someone still walking around out there?”

“No, you wouldn’t be a copy. Your brain has used her brain as a template over the course of its development, but not as a source to crib from. Think of her brain maps as a kind of constraint on the paths of your development.”

“Then we’re something alike,” Hasta said.

“You’d be related, in way, yes. I guess you could say that.”

This was a lot to take in on its own. Hasta felt like she was reaching a saturation point as far as wonder was concerned, but she couldn’t stop asking questions. “What’s her name?”

“I don’t have that information. All my brain-map data is anonymous. All I know is race and gender.”

“She’s South Asian, like me?”

Donald peered at something near his hand. “Um, no. She’s white.”

Hasta put a hand to her head, dizzy. Should that bother her? It did, deeply. She wanted to throw up.

She took a deep breath. “Okay, what about the world itself?” she asked. “It seems so real—vast, detailed. Not that I’d know the difference, I suppose. How did you create that?”

“The answer is, I didn’t create it. I repurposed it. You know about open-source software? There are libraries upon libraries of virtual environments available, some dating back almost to the turn of the century. I adapted your environment from one of the more realistic libraries and populated it with more open-source personalities than you could count.”

“Personalities? You mean open-source people?”

“No, I mean near Turing-level automata, the kind anyone might interact with in a virtual environment.”

“So wait,” Hasta said, “you’re not telling me my friends and family are just—just programmed robots or something, are you? I can’t believe that.”

“Not all of them,” Donald said. “Your friends, the ones you listed before, plus a few others, you’re all the same class of construct. Twelve of you in Chicago, in all.”

“We’re not all based on that one same person, are we?”

“Oh, no, you’d all be based on different templates. With the exception of, um—” He peered at something as he typed. “—Babich and Riefkohl, who are both based on the same template. The system throws in some randomness like that every once in a while, just to shake things up.”

Ivan and Juan the same person? How could that be? Hasta put her head in her hands, more devastated by the moment. She didn’t think she could take any more, but she had to know.

“And my parents?” she asked.

“Automata,” said Donald.

Hasta needed to get outside somewhere, get some air. “No, they can’t be,” she said, tugging at the collar of her shirt and standing up. “Well, maybe my mom. But not my dad, no way.”

“Hasta, that’s the way it is.” He sounded exasperated but firm.

“Fine,” she said. She told herself to stop thinking about herself. “What about the daemons? What’s the story with them?”

“Intelligent, adaptable anti-intrusion software. Guardians, I call them.”

“They tried to kill us, you know.”

Donald sighed. “I have the hardest time with them. There’s a few different levels of guardian security. The highest level, security daemon, started out as pretty standard ice. It kept out viruses, worms, Trojan horses, suicide bombers, live intruders, things like that. But through various iterations of the environment, as I started having some success generating my constructs, the daemons started attacking them. There was a lot of back-and-forth from one iteration to the next, fiddling with different threat parameters, changing the rules and limitations of construct behavior, until I found a reasonable balance. Eventually that included safe zones where the constructs could go to develop without interference.”

“Uh-huh,” Hasta said through gritted teeth. “And how were the constructs supposed to know about the safe zones, exactly?”

“Well, trial and error, obviously. Survival of the fittest. If certain behaviors attract dangerous attention, you learn not to engage in them, right? Either that or you learn safe places for doing them.”

“Even if the behavior is just trying to live your life?” Hasta shook her head. “What other rules did you set up for us?”

“There’s a lot,” Donald said, beginning to look pretty uncomfortable. “I mean, way too many to start enumerating.”

“You know, Donald,” said Hasta, “that’s an exceedingly messed-up way you have of treating people. You create them, and then you set up I don’t know how many rules they have to obey just to live their lives, and then you don’t tell them what the rules are? How is that fair?”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Donald said, the defensive meathead coming to the fore again. “It’s not like I’ve imposed these rules on you. The rules themselves are what creates you—starting conditions and invariable rules, like in the Game of Life. You wouldn’t even be you without them.”

Hasta fumed. “It still isn’t fair,” she said, not just angry with him but angry with herself for her inability to articulate her anger any better than that. “So how does the magic fit in with your precious rules? What’s the purpose of that?”

“What do you mean, the magic?” Donald asked, looking puzzled.

“You know, like when I teleport something with my middle finger.”

Donald’s mouth fell open. “Like when you what?”

“Flip it,” Hasta said, holding up her middle finger.

“Um,” said Donald. “Um.” He licked his lips, swallowed. His eyes darted back and forth. He started typing with hands that shook. “Um, all right. What else can you do?”

She circled her hand and put it to her eye. “We do this to see in the dark. We can move things with our fists, silence people by zipping our lips, um, make these little black windows that let us . . . Hey, are you okay?”

Donald had stopped typing and was just staring at her.

“Hasta,” he said, “those are my operating-system shortcuts you’re describing. That’s how I manually manipulate the environment when I go in—which I try not to do very often, since it’s kind of disruptive. But what authorizes me to use them is—” He swallowed again. “—is that the system recognizes the human complexity of my brain map.”

Hasta’s breath caught. “Are you saying I am human?”

“No,” said Donald. “But maybe you’re close enough that the system can’t tell any differently.” He was raising his hands very slowly from his sides. His demeanor had changed from amazed scientist to cautious animal handler. “Oh, Hasta, do we need each other, you and I. I wish we had your friends here too, but oh my, do we have a lot of study ahead of us. Maybe a Nobel prize down the road. You’re right, I do have to save you.”

His right hand flashed up from his side, palm forward. √

To be continued…