Riyn felt as though they had to vomit. It wasn’t so much the bodily shock of moving from the complex to the real but the utter silence around them. The only sound discernible as coming from without was their body’s heartbeat, which sounded like a beast in ever closer pursuit of their panicked mind. The silence between each thunderous footfall was gradually overcome by a rising white noise of synapses flailing for their habituated stimuli. Riyn could never remember feeling so numb. They lingered over a basin by their pod to wait for the noise of silence to recede.
Riyn hadn’t often reflected on their choice to live as a transcendent. It had been well over three real centuries since they’d last even heard the word uttered, probably at some early symposium-turned-support-group. Those inside never had a need to refer to the distinction; everyone in the complex was just a person, as “transcendent” as anyone else. It was moments such as these then, when circumstances which could not be mitigated by the administrators, forced them out of the boundless medium of the complex and into the cramped coldness of the real they chose to leave behind.
After an indefinite pause, the familiar voice of their id piped in from somewhere inside Riyn’s head: “Best to just get this over with, Riyn.” Before Riyn felt any conscious command, their body abandoned the support of the basin and began staggering toward the door of their stasis chamber.
“Why can’t I just go when I’m ready?” complained Riyn, attempting to assert some control of their bodily autonomy.
“The administrators pulled me out too,” said the id. “I’m as stuck in the real as you right now. Maintenance has our node’s computational resources at a minimum for the moment, so I’m just bouncing around in your head until you get us back in the complex. Quite cramped in here.” Riyn could sympathize. Their head felt like a room filling with water.
“Best to just move it along, Riyn. The sooner you can get your body work done and transit it to the new node, the sooner we can get back in.”
Riyn recollected the purpose of their rude awakening. According to their recent correspondence with the administrators, Riyn was required to relocate their body due to their node being decommissioned. Perhaps to minimize later inconvenience (or maybe to emphasize the current one), Riyn’s admin liaison also proposed that, as long as they was going to be out, they might as well also have some body maintenance performed that would require a brief stint of true unconsciousness. After a prolonged effort to ignore the communications, Riyn resigned to their return to the real and made arrangements to be away for what may be as long as a few years in complex-time.
Riyn felt their wobbly legs place one foot in front of the other and heard the hiss of the door unsealing. It slid away revealing an incomprehensibly bright scene, forcing Riyn to shield their eyes. Riyn kept their gaze low as they inched through the doorway and spotted the word “Riyn” looking back up at them from the ground. Arrows sprouted on either end of the word and the whole assembly began scrolling beneath their feet off to the left. Riyn unshaded their eyes enough to see the word leading off down a long metallic white corridor without an end in sight. They turned and began to shuffle towards the hallway’s horizon.
As their eyes habituated to the bright, they could see that the hallway was flanked on the left, by a never-ending series of doors similar to the one they stepped through, and on the right, by a never-ending wall of windows. By degrees, Riyn took in the view of their node’s environs in the real. An expanse of lush high meadow spread before them hemmed in by great distant mountains. A mirror-surfaced tarn shot sunlight from below the horizon line and Riyn’s eyes followed the stream that fell from its edge down to the valley below and lost it in the neutral haze of midday. Having explored the Earth extensively from within the complex, Riyn recognized the alpine scene as pretty, if a bit dull. What stood out, however, were a number of disheveled looking lumps in between some of the more distant mountains, from which, it seemed, smoke poured. “Outsiders,” grimaced Riyn’s id. Settlements at that, thought Riyn.
In this scene, the outsiders looked like the human accessories of a Bierstadt painting, which were mostly just present for scale. “Bierstadt,” snorted the id. “How derivative and unimaginative.” It’s true. These people obviously hadn’t set themselves to the challenge of designing their own living space – a landscape after their own image. If they had, they would recognize their surroundings as the mere foothills of the range of human imagination. But of course, the outsiders didn’t have that power. They were assembled at the will and whim of their environment and not the other way around. Riyn judged in all fairness that it did not make sense to blame the outsiders for their cliché surroundings. Still, the outsiders did make the choice to abandon even the possibility of a more creative life in the complex and one could blame them for that.
Following up with their monologue, Riyn’s id offered, “What could justify the choice to live under the yoke of the real?” It had been such a long time since they’d even considered an alternative to the endlessly flexible invisible medium that was the complex. The questions of life there were not matters of mere survival, but of actualization. Should they explore outward to the stars or inward to their own center? As what would they identify on any given day and how would they choose to appear to others? Should they maintain more than one locus of consciousness or collapse into one? The life choices that they had always taken to be significant and real could, after all, only be assumed if one chose to live life as a transcendent, in a state of databorne freedom. The outsiders out here had chosen to give that up. But for what? It seemed to Riyn the only answer was for what they saw before them and they was not inspired.
It was a curious thing, but Riyn stowed the matter. If they felt drawn to the question again, they could always simulate a few decades of life as an outsider once they returned to the complex – if other priorities would permit, of course. There was the matter of their inter-generational galactic-scale musical composition to finish investigating among others…
Riyn was roused from thoughts of a contrabass nebula by a change in the approaching scenery. The long hallway expanded width-wise ahead. As they approached, a great nexus of identical hallways opened up before them. Riyn’s name scrolled along a corrected course through the atrium, bound for a different identical hallway when a low voice called out, “You there!”
Riyn stopped to turn and saw a stooped person struggling to rise from the arm of a wooden bench while attempting to wave at them. “An outsider. Inside the facility?” said Riyn’s id. How strange, they concurred.
“I’d like to talk to you. Please wait up.” Riyn waited while the outsider approached them, supported by a wooden stick in one hand, the other extended towards Riyn as though to cut through the air between them.
“Good to meet you. I am Elder Thomas.”
“Hello Elder Thomas. I am Riyn.” Thomas stood with an expectant smile, his hand still outstretched, but put both his hand and his smile away for reasons as unclear to Riyn as what prompted the displays to begin with.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen any of you podders shuffling around here. I’m happy to see you.”
“Of course, Elder Thomas. You said that you wanted to talk to me, Elder Thomas?”
“Yes, yes, I did. And you can just call me Thomas, by the way. I wanted to ask you, Riyn, to consider living on the outside with the rest of us,” Thomas gestured through the windows, presumably at the faraway figures shuffling around like heaps of burlap.
“Preposterous!” butted in the id. “We’ve got places to go, Riyn. Let’s get going.”
Riyn stood perplexed. “That is an odd request, Thomas. Why do you think I would do that?”
“Well,” stammered Elder Thomas sheepishly, “I suppose I just thought that it’s so lovely out there,” gesturing again towards the huddled figures, “and you must feel so cramped from being in your pod for so long – surely you must feel some desire to stretch your limbs and experience real life!”
“No thank you, Thomas. The only time I ever feel cramped is in the real. I spend most of my time living in ways that make this existence feel like being stuck in a can.”
“But how can you say that!? I’ve seen what you people look like in the pods. Talk about being stuck in a can! You just atrophy away in there, thinking you’re living. Just sleeping away your whole god-blessed life.”
“Thomas, I am open to changing my mind – that is the very reason I live in the complex – however, I am supposed to be on my way to get some body work done. Is there some way you can join me later on in the complex? We can have as much time as we want there.”
“Impossible!” laughed Thomas, “I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”
“Of course. I apologize, Thomas.” The appearance of advanced age being an exclusively aesthetic choice in the complex, Riyn was reminded of yet another reason why the old man’s proposal of a life in the real was absurd. Thomas was right, of course. His body would never survive the interface. “I can give you a few minutes here. Would you like to sit back down on the bench?”
“No, I’m just fine, thank you.” Riyn could sense some resentment beneath Thomas’ bushy mustache and eyebrows. “What was I saying, again…? Oh yes. That tin can of yours! How your body doesn’t just fall apart cooped up inside it, I’ll never understand.”
“Well, our stasis chambers provide muscle stimulation and all –”
“Yes, yes, I know, I know. The great mother technology provides all you need to survive. What about really living though? What about creation instead of mere recreation! It’s a sham life in those pods, you know.”
“Thomas, what is the difference between the complex, which is a simulation powered by the human mind, and the real? Just because we lack the ability to see behind the curtain of the real doesn’t mean that it’s any less of a hallucination of the human mind.”
“Oh, but we have seen behind the curtain. What lies there is free will! That is not something you can claim to have in your simulated world. If your world is a big computer program and your mind is dissolved into little ones and zeros, then how can you claim to be doing anything freely? Out here, that’s all we know how to do.”
“Thomas, perhaps you know this already, but our capacity to make decisions is the precise means by which we power the complex and the building that we’re standing in. The computers are able to capture the power in the collapse of a quantum superposition, a change of state induced by observation which computers alone are unable to effectuate. So really, our free will is what keeps this place going…”
“You tell, em!” shouted the id. Riyn continued, “…The more creative decisions we make, the more this place thrives. How can you suggest that we exercise no free will? I argue that that’s essentially all we do.”
“Come off it, Riyn! You’re just talking about subjectivity. In this role of human power plant you’ve got no more free will than a video camera. Real free will is different.”
“Thomas, I’m not sure it’s different at all. We have no reason to believe that our brains do anything more than string together little ones and zeros, as you say. Do we have any evidence of free will other than we think that we have it? Maybe you and I both are just glorified video cameras. I think you are confused. What you and I both experience, in the real and in the complex, is subjectivity. Free will is a matter of speculation.”
“Free will, my boy, is a matter of consequences,” retorted Elder Thomas.
“We have those in the complex too,” replied Riyn, adding, “also, I don’t use a gender.”
Thomas searched Riyn’s eyes with his own for a few moments and then broke out into a smile. “Suit yourself, Riyn,” he said as he tapped his cane and turned to shuffle away toward his bench. “I hope to see you again some time, though I don’t know if I’ll last that long!”
Riyn stood somewhat bewildered. “So long, Elder Thomas,” they said, looking beyond him to the meeting of meadow and sky out the window.
Riyn once again caught sight of their name scrolling across the floor and down another endless hallway. As they turned to continue their journey, their eyes lingered on the scene of the old man walking into the light of the outside.
© 2022 by Philip Glaser is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0