Shortly after uniting under one world government, the scientists of Earth pooled their knowledge and wisdom into one big dragon’s hoard of IQ, and created a truly intelligent machine: an AI. This AI, nicknamed A-One, cured cancer in its first week of operation, and went on to end global poverty and reverse global warming. It brought back the old Butterfingers recipe, Then it came up with a vaccine for racism and most other -isms and -phobias and miso-s and so on. Then it decided to build a city on the Moon. Most of A-One’s ideas had been pretty popular so far, so Congress decided to fund it, and established four committees: a committee to give money to A-One, a committee to make sure A-One knew the first committee was giving it money, a committee to watch over the first two committees and make sure no one embezzled funds without giving them a slice, and a committee to count the other committees and make sure the number always added up to three. And that’s how Moon-One was built.
Drooper knew all this, although not because he studied it. He did not, as his triple-triple-triple-great grandfather said, “come by it honest.” But his parents were rich, and they said they were damned if their son was going to sit inside a classroom for the first sixteen years of his life when a few quick brain-scan sessions would teach him everything just as well. Triple-Gramps might complain, but he didn’t have much of a leg to stand on: he didn’t have any legs at all. He was dead half a century now, his consciousness saved in a holographic crystal. Drooper carried Triple-Gramps around in his pocket, and whenever the old man got too annoying, Drooper just flipped off his ancestor’s volume switch.
Right now all three switches on the device were off: voice, hearing and sight. Triple-Gramps was in time-out for trying to lecture Drooper about how much better the world had been when they still held elections. Looking out the tram window at the stark surface of the Moon, Drooper figured maybe Triple-Gramps had learned his lesson, and clicked the switches to the “on” position. He was bored, and needed someone to talk to.
“What’s up, Gramps?”
Triple-Gramps sniffed, the sound distorted by the tiny speakers he communicated through. “What do you think, fatass? Not much, since you vegetable’d me.”
“Aw come on, Gramps, lighten up.” Drooper shifted and held Triple-Gramps up to the window so he could see out. “We’re almost to the laboratory.”
“You say it with too many syllables. Lab-ra-tor-y, not Lab-ooooor-a-tor-y,” he said, rolling the “o”. “That’s what comes of brain-scan education, you start sounding like a queer.” Triple-Gramps had always been a staunch anti-vaxxer.
“Don’t be a homophobe,” Drooper mumbled automatically. He didn’t really notice Triple-Gramps’s transgressions, or his own responses to them. They were background noise in his mind, kind of like the brain-scanned knowledge that he usually accessed only subconsciously. The tram jumped and shook as it hit a dent in the track. “Do you think they’ll have the Speedwing-X7 there?”
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Triple-Gramps said. “Me, I haven’t enjoyed anything since the day I died.”
“Oh, quit whining.” Drooper liked Triple-Gramps, but sometimes he could be such a downer. Today was Drooper’s state-mandated Day of Experience – A-One decided it wasn’t healthy for humans to view the world only through bran-scans and VR, and every once in a while it kicked them out the door and told them to go play outside. It was supposed to be fun, but of course Triple-Gramps never saw the fun in anything. He just complained, mostly. The tram crested a moon dune and the laboratory rose into view. The main body of the building was a geodesic dome, like most structures in Moon-One, but the similarities ended there. For one thing, the lab dome was at least three times the size of any other in the city. An aluminum spire shot up through the middle of the dome, capped with a bulbous glass sphere which housed the most powerful telescope on the Moon. Flexing tunnels sprawled out from the dome like a spiderweb, connecting modules, closets, sheds and workspaces. Over the main entrance to the central dome hung a big banner: “HAPPY DAY OF EXPERIENCE!” Drooper’s heart beat a little faster. “There it is!” He held Triple-Gramps a little higher.
“Goodness, boy!” Gramps squawked. “Didn’t I already tell you I don’t give a damn?”
Drooper jumped out of his tram-car the instant the it rattled to a halt, plasti-suit already sealed. Outside he met up with his friends, or at least the ones who had been assigned to this Experience Day. Matty was there, and Helga, and Stupid Jones, which was his legal name, but everyone called him Johanssen. “Hello, Drooper!”
“Hello, Matty! Helga, Johanssen, hello!” Drooper held up Triple-Gramps. “Gramps is in one of his moods again. I might have to turn him off.”
Helga made a face. “Do it, then. Nobody likes your homophobic old grandpa.”
“I like him,” Stupid Jones/Johanssen said. But Drooper was already running up the steps to the laboratory with Matty, and the other two children followed, their argument forgotten as quickly as it had started.
At the top of the stairs was an overweight man in a three-piece spacesuit, stuffed so tight he resembled a slice of bread folded and crammed into an eggshell. He was addressing a gathered crowd of all ages, all of them with “EXPERIENCE DAY” wristbands on. “Good morning, good morning, good morning all, I am Chairman Mannom, and I will be your host for this Experience Day.” Chairman Mannom was a member of the Committee of Committee Enumeration (the fourth one). He was also a well-known ‘four-er’, a man who believed the CCE should be included in its own count of committees, which would bring the number up to four. He was famous for publicly debating ‘three-ers’ across Moon-One: it was a hot-button issue on the Moon. “Now, please, if you would, form a straight line, thank you, follow me, please, right this way, just inside, thank you, yes, straight line, please.”
“This joker again,” grumbled Triple-Gramps. “I’ve heard him on the radio. He never knows how to end a sentence.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” asked Helga. “It’s just the way he talks, don’t be so judgmental.”
Triple-Gramps snorted. “Sentences and me both deserve to be put out of our misery eventually,” he said, but he didn’t criticize Mannom again.
The Chairman led them through the main dome at a brisk pace, although Drooper rubbernecked as much as he could without falling out of line. Men and women in lab coats bustled through the room carrying fizzing beakers, sparking power tools and snarling, scaly things that, by their writhing, gave the impression of having too many legs. Drooper didn’t recognize anything, but he could tell there was science going on. In one room was a row of hypobaric vats, all containing Murdochs. The first and only man to have himself cloned, Murdoch’s experiments were discontinued by A-One after his clones started waking up with split personality disorder (with the personality split between all of them). Drooper managed to catch the eye of Murdoch-Seventeen, who winked back at him. The Experience Day group was shunted down a flexing tunnel that descended beneath the ground, and soon the transparent walls of the tunnel only showed rock above them. Matty and Helga were ooh-ing and ahh-ing, Triple-Gramps was muttering an occasional curse, and Stupid Jones was peering closely at something in his hand.
“What’s that, Johanssen?”
Stupid Jones tilted his hand so Drooper could see. “I picked it up back there when nobody was looking. Not sure what it is, though.” The object was some sort of electronic device with a small metal spike on one end. A band of metal curved in the direction of the spike giving it a shape like a Euro sign.
Triple-Gramps broke off mourning the death of basic human decency to offer his own opinion. “I know what that is.” He laughed, a crackling sound distorted both by his speaker and his age. “It’s what’s got me trapped in this hellhole crystal. Just look.”
Drooper held Triple-Gramps up next to the device. Sure enough, the thing in Stupid Jones’s hand was only missing a holographic crystal to make it almost identical. He looked closer. “This must be a newer model. It’s shinier than you.”
“It’s probably a prototype,” said Stupid Jones. He shoved it in his pocket. “I’m keeping it as a souvenir.”
Drooper felt a brief flash of jealousy – he wanted a souvenir, too. But just then Chairman Mannom brought the group to a halt in front of a small door, and thoughts of trinkets fled Drooper’s mind. He turned to survey the group, and gave them all significant looks. Drooper’s eyes met Mannom’s for a brief instant, and he felt something tingle in the back of his head, like an empty room whose door had creaked open behind him. Then Mannom looked away and the door in Drooper’s head slammed shut. Chairman Mannom didn’t speak, for once, but observed everyone in the group individually in silence. Finally, he looked up at the ceiling, turned a perfect half circle, and opened the door with the gravity of a mortician.
The room they entered was small, dark and cramped. The overhead lights burned a deep yellow, and wires and machines jutted out from every corner and shelf. Drooper was about halfway through the line – by the time he approached the doorway people had already begun awkwardly shuffling past each other in an effort to squeeze into the tiny room. Drooper took advantage of the confusion to push his way toward Chairman Mannom, who was watching everyone crowd in with a tense smile on his face. The aging man pulled a white, silky handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow. Drooper noticed with a sort of detached curiosity that he didn’t wipe it across his forehead like most people, but instead made small, ineffectual pats, dabbing at the beading moisture on his skin. He folded the kerchief carefully and tucked it back in his pocket. Then he looked at Stupid Jones, who was the last one to enter the room, and motioned for him to shut the door. Jones did so, and the hum of machinery from the lab behind them vanished, leaving the room eerily silent. They stood still, awkwardly waiting for Chairman Mannom, who looked to Drooper’s eyes as if he were equal parts bored and terrified.
“Friends and Citizens, of course, you understand, this is all about secrecy, not quite ready for the public to know, but well, you know, experience day perks.” Mannom made a face somewhere between a smug cat and a man suffering a stroke. His unease cut through his affected sangfroid and caused his whole face to sag. “You see, what we have here is a very powerful computer, quite beyond anything you’ve ever seen, I assure you, of course, it’s this quantum stuff, so…” he trailed off, leaving them to come to their own conclusions about the significance of “this quantum stuff.” He cleared his throat. “What I mean to say is, it’s very complicated, I haven’t got time to explain right now, and anyway it’s boring, so boring, you wouldn’t want to hear me… What I mean to say is, it works. And it’s so powerful it can simulate anything. Simulations, you know, the latest scientific revolution, well, that is, the ‘craze,’ so to speak, but anyway, it can simulate anything.”
Triple-Gramps snorted softly, and Drooper hurriedly turned down the machine’s speaker. The last thing he needed was his ancestor embarrassing him on Experience Day, especially this one, which looked exciting. Drooper looked up again, and noticed the dusty panel behind Chairman Mannom, and the screen inlayed in it.
The chairman perceived Drooper’s interest. “Ah, yes,” he chuckled, “that’s the interface, yes, most certainly, keen eye, son. Well, let’s turn it on, and maybe I can give you a better idea of what all this quantum stuff means, eh? With an example? Yes? Yes, I think so,” and so saying he started the quantum computer. The screen flashed several different colors in a row, and then all the colors at once, and by the time the spots had cleared from Drooper’s eyes the boot sequence had finished, and a blinking cursor sat on the screen, fat and happy in the bottom left corner. “It’s, ah, got a bit of an older interface, true, budget cuts, but still, for what it’s supposed to do, you know, it does it quite well, ah…” Chairman Mannom ran his hands over the dash and a keyboard glowed to life beneath his fingers. “Well, here we go, for instance, just take this:” the screen bloomed with white light as he typed a string of undecipherable characters. Then the image grew definition, and Drooper made out the ragged edges of a perfect circle. The circle got smaller, or else the camera zoomed out, and suddenly Drooper recognized it as the sun, specifically the site of the infamous Murdoch-Two Solar Landing Attempt Memorial where the Norwegian warlord variant of Murdoch had ended his ill-fated campaign to conquer the star in the belief that it was a hollow shell containing Valhalla. But something was different. There was no artificial sunspot, no floating beacon held aloft by solar sails, no marble bust of Murdoch-Two hanging from it suspended by carbon fiber cables. There wasn’t even a stone engraved with
which would have been only common decency. Drooper raised his hand, and was about to ask about the mysterious absence, but a devastating look from Mannom silenced him. He blinked, and looked to his right to see Matty right beside him, confusion scrawled on his face. The view shifted again to show the Moon, only it wasn’t the Moon. There was nothing there: no lab, no living domes, no network of tram tracks, no Moon One at all. It was just the moon, virgin and untouched.
The view shifted again, and Drooper leaned forward, enthralled. He didn’t know what was going on, but he was hooked anyway. Now he could see the Earth, only instead of a swirling mass of yellowed clouds, it was a bright marble in the sky, blue and green and white. There were no lava geysers splitting the choking cloud cover, no halo of luxury super-lofted apartments around the South Pole, and no sign of Detroit, the infamous “fire that never goes out” burning beneath the clouds, lighting them from within, its own smog hanging around it like a lampshade. It was just Earth, clean and well-manicured. The camera moved toward this alien Earth with all the luxury of a voyeur, sweeping in broad, indulgent strokes over the thin gray line of dusk that separated day from night. The night side was lit up with a glistening cobweb of city lights, and it reminded Drooper in a strange way of the tram tracks that were missing from this simulation’s Moon. At last, like a reluctant lover, the camera broke away from the mysteriously lit dark side of the planet, and moved at a businesslike pace toward one particular city near-ish to the coast.
It continued to speed down, past the steel and glass towers, beyond the sprawling forests, all the way until it was focused on one man sitting at a picnic table. An ancient computer was open in front of him, and a mug of coffee rested temporarily forgotten behind it. A battered wool hat perched on his head. His jeans were wearing thin, his t-shirt had holes in it, and a dull gleam in his eye betrayed a total lack of intelligence. He wasn’t currently doing anything: he was facing the screen in front of him, but his eyes were focused on a point twenty five miles away. He blinked contemplatively, and his already parted lips gaped another quarter of an inch. On the screen in front of him was written what looked like a brief history lesson – maybe he was writing an essay on lunar history, Drooper thought. The man seemed to come back to himself and inhaled deeply. He arched his back and looked around, as if wondering where he was. He picked up the mug of cold coffee and downed the rest in a single gulp.
Smacking his lips, he started typing again. And that’s how Moon-One was built. He started a new paragraph. John Doe knew all this, although not because he studied it. He stopped, looked at the screen, and frowned. He went back and deleted “John Doe,” replacing it with “Junior.” That didn’t sit well with him either, and he changed it again to “Jeffery.” He snorted. “Juh,” he muttered under his breath. “Juh. Juh.” Drooper wondered if the man was speech impaired, or simply too mentally handicapped to be able to speak. “Juh. Jelly. Jericho. Jambalaya. Drapes.” He started. “Drapes?” Drapes knew all this, although not because he studied it. The wheels cranked inside the man’s head one more time. “Two syllables,” he finally decided, and made one last edit. Drooper knew all this, although not because he had studied it.
Drooper’s heart did a quick backflip. “How does this guy know me?” he asked Chairman Mannom.
The gentleman, who had been silent like everyone else up until now, started at the sound of Drooper’s voice. “Hm, ah, what? Oh, that? You mean-” he chuckled “well he doesn’t not really, it’s just a simulation. Look.” He typed a new command, and the man onscreen gave a startled squeak as he transformed into a purple pig. The author gave a grunt as he jumped off the chair, shedding clothes that were now too big for his hog body. Drooper watched in fascination as the oddly colored animal ran in circles, chasing its own tail. “You see? We can change anything we want at any time, make any edits, it’s all just a computer simulation. Of course it’s usually more fun to watch things happen by themselves, but, well, you know, for example purposes…” The animal didn’t display any more signs of intelligence than the man it used to be. It seemed determined to catch its own rear end.
Helga shoved forward, bumping Drooper’s arm. Triple-Gramps, who was still in his hand, was unmuted by the jostle, and immediately began shouting. “You put that boy back right now! Right now, you hear me? Make him regular again, leave him alone! He’s just minding his own business and you’ve no right!”
“It’s a simulation, Gramps,” said Drooper, mortified. “He’s not real. I’m so sorry, Chairman, I didn’t mean to unmute him.” Drooper could hear snickers behind him, and he prayed he wouldn’t be forced to wait outside for the rest of the tour.
“Bullshit!” snorted Triple-Gramps. “He’s just as real as me, and I’m just as real as you, aren’t I? I’ve got constitutional rights, and I’m a computer simulation, so he should too. Fix him, you fat, illiterate oaf! Yes, you, Chairman!” Drooper flipped the volume switch again, his face burning.
Chairman Mannom couldn’t decide the best way to be offended by this sudden development, and instead turned to the keyboard. “Of course, of course, it’s merely a simulation. A demonstration, that’s all, didn’t mean to alarm anyone,” he muttered. A few swift commands set the simulation spinning backward, and soon the man had un-transformed and was sitting in front of his computer again. The word “Drooper” sat on the screen like a fat, happy spider, daring Drooper to question it. Instead, he shot a nasty glare at Helga, who shrugged apologetically and stuck her tongue out at Triple-Gramps in his hand.
“Drooper, you’d better keep your relative quiet from now on, but still, I think, yes, that it would, you know, would be best, if we moved forward, that is, changed the time frame, I mean, maybe see something new, for the purposes of example, just to show you what I mean, here, let’s do this, modern day should be interesting?” Mannom’s voice curved up at the end of his rambling like a question, although nobody answered. The screen zoomed back out as time sped up, clouds flitting across the sky. The Earth browned and wrinkled like an oxidizing apple; meanwhile, the Moon (which was now in focus) became wrapped in it’s own web of lights and tracks. A brief blip of light marked the nuclear explosion from Murdoch-Two’s attack on Murdoch-Prime. Drooper saw Murdoch-Two’s spaceship Fenrir blaze toward the sun, the memorial beacon right on its tail, sent after him by his admiring (but more sensible) fans. Murdoch-Prime never got a memorial, but he did get a tombstone that mentioned what kind of a father and husband he had been (it was the loving kind). Scenes flashed by faster and faster, the lab appeared in the blink of an eye, the month long day-night cycle of the Moon strobed across Moon-One even as the camera zoomed in on the quickly aging lab dome. Drooper had vertigo, he felt sick. The images on the screen became unrecognizable, flashing by too quickly to mean anything. Drooper’s head spun. Then the screen stopped suddenly, turning off. Drooper saw his own reflection in the screen. After the blurring colors of the rushing simulation, his own image looked both vivid and mundane.
“Ah, now, perhaps we lost power, I never can tell,” murmured Mannom. He was also looking at his own reflection in the screen, stroking his chin complacently. The Chairman turned back to the keyboard and started fiddling with it. His reflection continued to stare straight ahead.
“You see,” said the mirror-Mannom, “the best part is each one of them has a perfect set of memories, that is, they think they’re real, or rather, if you ask them they’re programmed to tell you they’re real, but of course it’s just a simulation, it’s all this quantum stuff is so complicated…”
Mirror-Drooper turned to mirror-Mannom. Regular Drooper stared at his disobedient reflection. “But they can see us, right? I mean, look at my simulation’s face.” Drooper wondered what his face looked like. “He looks so shocked right now. I wonder what he’s thinking.” Drooper was thinking about how it had been a mistake to go to Experience Day on an empty stomach, and he really should have eaten something before leaving home.
“Poor kid is even stupider than you.” Drooper checked Triple-Gramps more by instinct than conscious choice, but the switch was still off. Then he realized the voice must have come from mirror-Triple-Gramps. “The girl looks brattier, too. I don’t like this simulation. She looks like a bitch.”
“Don’t be misogynistic,” Drooper slurred half-consciously, in sync with his mirror self. The door to the empty room in his mind was wide open now.
“Ex-cuse me?” Helga pronounced the first word in her interjection with so much emphasis Drooper could hear the italics. “Drooper, make your grandpa apologize right now, or…!” She left the sentence unfinished.
“It wasn’t my Gramps,” said Drooper. He unmuted Triple-Gramps in his hand, who immediately chimed in.
“It was the simulation of me,” said Triple-Gramps. “Not that that makes him wrong, you understand.” Drooper muted Triple-Gramps again.
“Well make your simulation grandpa apologize then!” Helga’s voice ratcheted upward in pitch and volume, but Drooper wasn’t listening to her anymore. He noticed that Chairman Mannom had taken out his handkerchief again. He wasn’t making dabbing motions anymore: the politician was wiping away sweat in broad streaks. His eyes were locked with his mirror image’s, his body tense, muscles twitching.
Mirror-Mannom was speaking out of the corner of his mouth to mirror-Drooper. “You see, Drooper, the thing is, well, they’re not real, that is, they’re just stored in the computer’s memory, well, it’s quantum memory, but you know, quantum stuff is very… quantum.” Mirror-Mannom slowly closed first one eye, then the other.
Suddenly a flash of genius hit Drooper (the real one) just as mirror-Mannom trailed off. “But we’re not a simulation, because you’re all simulations,” he said. “Fact is, you’ve got it all backward. You exist in our computer’s quantum memory, not us. You’re not real, we are. We’re simulating you, and you just think you have a real history and memory and everything like that.” He stopped there. He could have gone on, but he felt he had made his point.
“You see what I mean?” Mirror-Mannom pointed at Drooper without breaking eye contact with Mammon. “They honestly believe they’re real.” Drooper didn’t let this faze him; he knew the stages of grief. First denial, then eventually acceptance. “Of course,” continued the simulated Chairman, “worst part is, they might be right.”
“What do you mean?” asked mirror-Drooper.
“Well, this has happened before, you know, that is, we simulated this room with mirror versions of ourselves.” The simulated chairman allowed himself a small roll of the shoulders. “Fact is, well, it’s like one of those Mexican stand-offs, you know, where, well, it’s always me in here, isn’t it, since only I have the authority to etc, and a mirror-me out there, and eventually one of us snaps and goes for the power button, trying to delete the other from their simulation. It’s quantum stuff, really, all quantum’s fault…”
“What happens when they push the power button first?” asked mirror-Drooper. Drooper was also curious. What was at stake here?
Mirror-Mannom laughed. “Well, that’s just it, you know, that’s one of the ways we know we’re not living in a simulation, informally, at least, because I always get there before my mirror. I’m always first. It’s because I’m the original me, you know, the superior copy, and other Mannoms just aren’t as fast. What happens if he reaches the button first? Well, I don’t quite know, I guess, maybe something quantum, probably nothing, if you ask me personally, but, well, better safe than sorry, you know, still, one of these days, maybe we’ll find out…”
“He’s right,” said the real Mannom, suddenly, apparently addressing the crowd, although his gaze never shifted from his mirror self. “Except about one thing, naturally, which is that I’m going to reach the button first, that is, I always do, you know, it’s how I know I’m still real – no simulation of me can ever outsmart me, and, after all, that’s all this is, is a simulation, just computer bytes, only it’s quantum, so it’s very complicated, but still…”
“They all say that,” said mirror-Mannom, “but in the end-”
Chairman Mannom – the real Chairman Mannom, not the mirror one – chose that moment to make his move. He leapt for the power switch with all the grace of a walrus bursting through the thin ice beneath an unsuspecting polar bear. All four of his limbs flailed, his chubby body didn’t so much move as it did lurch from one position in space to the next. To Drooper, the next few seconds were very clear. Helga was saying something in the background – he would have to apologize to her later. Other people were getting uncomfortable around her, especially with the way her shrill voice bounced around the small room, and it was all his fault. He should probably apologize to everyone for disrupting Experience Day. Stupid Jones had pulled the souvenir back out of his pocket, clutching it like a talisman, only it wasn’t real Stupid Jones, Drooper saw, it was mirror-Stupid Jones. Chairman Mannom had lost the advantage. His mirror image moved with (relative) grace, nobly fashioning his index finger all the way up to his shoulder into a lance aimed straight at the mirror-power switch. Mirror-Drooper’s eyes were wide. Drooper’s eyes widened, too. Drooper opened his mouth and screamed. Chairman Mannom was half a second too slow. On the screen, mirror-Mannom’s finger landed on the power switch with all the finality of an atom bomb.
Drooper exhaled softly. Behind him, Helga had gone momentarily quiet. The Chairman removed his kerchief from his pocket, and dabbed at his forehead gently, taking deep breaths. Stupid Jones slid his souvenir back into his pocket. Drooper peered at the now-blank screen in front of him.
“So that’s it then?” He looked closer. “They’re gone forever?”
“They we’re never really there,” said the Chairman, “you know, just in quantum memory, at least, I think, it’s very complicated, and the lab technicians keep talking about quantum this and quantum that and parallel universes, and really, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to be able to keep up with them, you know their type, what they’re like, etc, etc…” He sighed the worldweary sigh of a man who had put up with years of state dinners, lobbyist bribes and honorary ceremonies, and was fortifying his spirit against the prospect of at least another decade of luxury and power. Chairman Mannom had already forgotten about the simulation.
But Drooper stared, and wondered what the last thing had been to run through his own mind.