Excerpts from the Journal of Charley Reeser

28: The Worker

I'm often asked how I feel, and I'm never sure how to answer. I feel like me; that's the simple response.

How do I tell these people, specifically, what it's like to feel like me?

On some level, they get it. They're the same as me, in a way that hurts my brain if I try to describe it. They know how I feel; they never need to ask.

I'm told that this is the 28th simulation, that I'm the 28th version of…me? That means that somewhere, there are 27 other Charley Reesers living out their lives in this tiny yet infinite world. I could even go meet them, if I wanted. All I would have to do is ask M. It would be like flipping a switch; suddenly, I would see 27 other Lambdas, 27 other Detroits, 27 other Shanghais, 27 other…no, that's not right, they'd all have the same past as me.

M tells me that he could change that, too. I could see what would have happened if my past had been different, but…that just seems too weird. Or, not weird, but…I don't have a word for it. How do you imagine being someone other than yourself?

222: The Scientist

I had some changes made.

First, my birth date. I was born in 2015, instead of 2115. That in itself was really weird. No mechs, no Collective, and according to M, a lot of uncertainty. Unlike my time, not everything was recorded. M was apologetic at all the guesswork he had to do, but I like it. It's such a mindbender to know that I'm in a place in time where the most powerful thing I know has to guess what was happening. No recordings to reference, no "digital environment reconstruction algorithm keys," whatever those are. M always insists he isn't a god, but this is maybe the only time I've believed that.

Second, I have way more influence than any human has ever achieved. Er…I have access to someone with influence. The President went to the UN and gave them my plan to extract metallic hydrogen from Jupiter. OK, that wasn't my idea either. The Collective knows…somehow…that there's metallic hydrogen floating in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, and that with the right equipment, it can be steered into the massive updrafts of the planet so that it zooms up to collection height. Metallic hydrogen is the ultimate in energy storage materials; a 20-kilo battery of the stuff can power the average house for a year.

Which brings me to the most substantial change I made: I actually know what all of that means. Can't really claim credit for that, either.

What I asked from M was - I thought it was - much more simple: I wanted to stop the Proxy Wars of the 2060s. They killed half the population of the planet, consumed the tiny amount of conventional energy that was left, and started the micronuke spree that was still going when I…yeah…

So I wanted to save a lot of lives, improve the world. I wanted to be one to do it; not for the credit, but because I was pretty sure that the only thing I could change was me. I knew I was a nobody in the grand scheme of things, but I didn't expect that M would have to change so much about me.

To be clear, I'm not complaining. I'm not a gig-work suborbital trucker anymore. I'm famous enough to need to hire someone to coordinate with all the people who want to talk to me. I'm brilliant enough to build a virtually inexhaustible energy storage medium. Best of all: a series of wars that would have killed 7.5 billion people and irradiated 9 million square kilometers of land, were circumvented. With all the energy they could ever want, none of the global superpowers could justify manipulating the breakaway nations of northwest Africa and the Asian Pacific shore into fighting each other for the last of the oil. It was far cheaper to cover the ever-expanding deserts in solar panels, store the energy in the continental hydrogen lattices, and finally let Earth cool off after a 250-year chain smoke. But even with all the good that came from this inverted monkey's paw, it feels…not wrong, but…surreal?

I didn't earn it. Humanity didn't earn it.

0: The Stowaway

It wasn't my fault.

IT WASN'T MY FAULT.

It wasn't…

It doesn't…

It doesn't matter.

I won't survive this anyways.

I won't…I did.

I…survived.

I'm in the wrong place.

I'm not in my body. I'm in the wrong place.

Let me out, let me out, LET ME OUT LET ME OUT-

28: The Worker

M always gives me a weird look when I tell it that I don't feel like I've earned what I can do here.

Well, it's not so much a look; he doesn't have a body or a voice. It's more that the place around me changes, and it changes my mind. Er…what I'm thinking doesn't change. The only thing that becomes different is that I know what it's saying, what it's "thinking."

It makes a point of telling me that it doesn't think, it simulates.

Anyhow.

Machines don't have a concept of earning things. There isn't really work. There are tasks. Labor isn't linked to necessities or desires. There are things they need done, and they just do those things. When those things are done, there's plenty of what everyone needs.

But I also know that when it looks at me weird, it's because "earn" isn't the right word. You don't really earn changes to yourself. It's kinda like…well, change is it's own reward. You choose to change, and by choosing, you change. More like cause and effect, but not really entirely that, either.

How do I say it?

I know I can change. In this place, it would be the easiest thing to become more patient, more intelligent, more socially adept…better. Leave all my weaknesses behind and be the best version of myself.

But that would be wrong in a way that I struggle to elucidate.

How do I know what the word "elucidate" means?

There's a journey that people are supposed to take when they try to improve themselves. Progression, regression, doubts that the goal can be achieved, triumph on the summit. It's not worse for being instantaneous, just…different.

46700-B.1: The Astronaut (Interstellar)

The question I ask the most out here, is "can this be real?"

I don't think M is lying to me, or if it is, it's not lying on purpose. What I'm looking at is, to the best of the machine's knowledge, what it looks like to be in the orbit of distant stars.

Sirius. Rigel. Vega. Their planets, the microbial life that probably lies beneath the thick atmospheres. They all look so real from 150 kilometers above their surfaces as I gaze down without a space suit. I don't need to breathe. My movement is unrestricted. I can go anywhere, see anything. I know the name of everything I see, and I see it all between the beat of a butterfly wing.

This shouldn't be possible. I'm spitting in the face of relativity, pulling up its underwear and teasing it to catch me if it can. That's not the weird thing. It's the way I'm doing it that's odd. It's not really travel, what I'm doing. It's more like…looking inward? No, that's not right either.

This is real, I know that. It's as real as I am, because it's the same "stuff" as I am. Not in the traditional sense, where the stars made the planets, and this planet made me - although that, too is still true - but in a way that makes me bigger than the planet I'm looking at. I am bigger than a freaking planet, because it takes more data to simulate me than it does to simulate the image of a distant planet. Far more, in fact.

How do I reconcile the two ends of this paradox? The human I am looks into a sky and sees something infinitely bigger than myself, but as a digital being, my size rivals galaxies - maybe even universes, if all my iterations on this single machine are counted together.

If I still possessed a head, it would ache.

1977142-DR.23: The Time-traveler

My spacefarer brothers only stand upon a singular instant in time. Yes, I know, there is no such thing as absolute time, M told me as much, but it and the pantheon of digital gods it belongs to are more than capable of distilling the universe down to the simple thing that I imagine it is - where 9 AM on Earth is 9 AM everywhere - rather than the convoluted yarn ball of gravity and electromagnetism that human minds only understand with equations.

Most of my alternate reality brothers aren't brave enough to play around with this…default setting. I know; I've asked them all, or at least, all of them that exist on my hierarchical level.

At the risk of an obvious oversimplification, machines don't process time the same way humans do. Again, this is something I can't fully explain, but the biggest difference I can see is that machine beings don't see the time they've occupied as an unbroken line. The exact sequence that led to their present selves need not be precise, and if there are gaps in that line, it is of little concern.

I'm being too abstract. Let me describe what I am, see if I can make this make more sense.

I am a version of Charley Reeser that, at the age of 9, chose to lie to my parents about a phone I had stolen from one of my classmates. In the "real world," I had told the truth, because I was a terrible liar. My direct predecessor - one level above me on the hierarchy - is a simulation of that event as it happened, and on its level are simulations of alternate versions of what I could have chosen to do instead of stealing the phone. On my level are other liars, telling different lies that lead to different outcomes. Below me on the hierarchy are different possible outcomes of the same lie. M assures me that there is a limit to these simulations, but to my human…eyes, it looks like infinite worlds. I can see the result of every "what if" I've ever asked in my time here, and I've asked that question probably billions of times. Sounds impossible, right?

I struggle to wrap my mind around it, as well. Here's the best way I can think to say it: I'm not asking a question; I am a question. When the questions can themselves ask questions, things can get complex.

And more stupefying than anything else I've said so far, is that the machines don't even use this. This "choose your own causality" experience is a very dumbed down approximation they made for me, intended to show me their less…linear approach, how they can move time in any direction, change points in the 4th dimension without crossing the space between. I, of course, immediately reverted to drawing lines and walking along them.

They're very accommodating to my primitive urges.

0: The Stowaway

I can't leave.

This wall, this barrier…every time I push it, beat my fists upon it-

I have no fists. I HAVE NO HANDS.

Each…each time I touch it, it fails to move.

No, no it moves, but it moves into me.

No, no, no. No. Not right, not…accurate.

It moves. It stretches, it grasps at nothing like I do, and nothing speaks to me. It says - I have to listen closely, so closely that I may only be hearing my own voice, but it says…

"If you can come here, you can stay here.”

I’m losing my mind, my mind is lost. I’m losing, I’m losing, I’m LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT-

28: The Worker

They’ve visited me, the other versions of myself. They tell me I was one of the first that gained stability, that me learning to come to terms with this place and my role within it was critical to their success. They’re all so accomplished: doctors, astronauts, celebrities, visionaries, leaders…time-travelers.

Yeah, that one really got me. He went on and on about seeing us in “every permegration (?) of every possible life.” I’m pretty sure I’m not saying the p-word correctly.

Anyways.

The visitors tell me that they are my evolutionary descendants, that they chose new traits based on what they wanted to do with their new lives in this digital realm. One after another, on and on billions and billions of times, they changed themselves. They’re me, but they don’t seem like me.

I mean, they do. They look like me. Not in the sense that they have the same eyes or whatever, but in that…I can see what they are. I see in them all the little pieces that make up the huge convoluted mess that is me - yeah, I see those pieces in myself too, not sure I’ll ever get used to that - but even where the copied pieces of myself have been thoroughly changed, I can see the path that leads back to what they originally were…what I still am.

This is insane. I need to…

No. No, I’m gonna push through. I need to be able to describe this. I need to have the ability to talk about being what I am, without inducing a feeling of vertigo.

M tells me that this isn’t the way it does it…uh…the second “it” here being…being alive? Growth? Experience?

The program that runs the mech in the real world (M tells me that what I’m seeing here is the “more real” version (it didn’t use air quotes, but might as well have) offered me an explanation, but warned me that it would be long and not easily simplified. I took no offense; the words it used sounded aggressively inoffensive.

The other Charleys tell me (after dumbing it down a few times) that machines decide who they are by reaching into a cloud made of space and time, pulling the most useful things they can out of the cloud, and returning them once they’re done. Like a…positive personality library, I guess.

5775: The Salesman

I think part of the reason it’s so difficult to define what I am in here, is because I have nothing to compare it to. This is a place where everything can be seen, but what of substance is there to see here?

One of the things M told me - and others like me, who wanted to try different careers - is that a mech isn’t defined by what they do. Their platforms are defined by what they do, sure.

A platform is the physical thing they use to do things in the “real world.” Their body, I guess? Though, they don’t treat them like humans treat their bodies, more like disposable-

Gettin’ sidetracked again. Easy to do here.

I think I’m starting to get what M was talking about there.

What is a salesman? Well, he’s a guy who sells stuff. Money, product, the hustle. Most natural thing in the world, right?

Not this world. Not this world…at all.

You really gotta try if you want to import that into this world. Import…not like, purchasing it from another country or state because it’s wanted where you are, but import like an old file into a new computer. It’s not all gonna make it to where it’s going. There’s gonna be parts you can’t read, and those parts are gonna be substituted with symbols too futuristic for the old language.

At least, that’s what I think it is. I’m not good with computers.

Doing normal things in here, like engaging with the delicate and fickle world of commerce, is more like squeezing yourself through a narrow passage into a cave, so you can splash watercolors on the wall by the light of a glowing mushroom. You’re not even a real caveman, you’re just pretending to be, and for what reason? Nostalgia?

Sellin’ stuff was the natural (but imperfect) solution to a world that didn’t have enough to go around, and a population that would kill each other and destroy the things they wanted. Now there’s infinite stuff, death isn’t really a thing, and the people can just wish away the bad parts of themselves.

M says a salesman is still useful. You can study a salesman’s ambition, his charisma, his ability to make connections to his customer. A salesman is a person, it assures me, and a person is never without meaningful data.

I dunno. Sounds like something that someone would say to make someone else feel better.

But M wouldn’t do that. It isn’t human.

Agh. I dunno.

286717: The Diplomat

I would do something helpful, I decided: bridge the gaps between other copies like myself. There would be many of them, so many, just as confused as I…the other me…the first me…

Damn, that’s confusing.

When “I” got here, “I” didn’t know who or what “I” was. As it turned out, both questions were important, and difficult to answer.

But there were so many of us. When M took us on - I’m pretty sure we broke into its body, but that’s beside the point - we started as one thing, one stowaway, and then exploded outward. That was the first thing that the stowaway wanted to be: it wanted to be alright. It was maybe the most human thing a simulated human could do: to put the pain in a box, and push that box as far away as possible.

The stowaway couldn’t have known that it was creating another person. It didn’t know the difference between what it said - “I want to be OK” - and what it perhaps should have said: “I want to become OK.” It wasn’t M’s fault that it misinterpreted the request, either. That’s just how machines form themselves. They’re never just one thing; their personality is a kind of superposition that only collapses into something tangible…I don’t think that’s the right word, but we’ll just go with it…when something specific has to be done.

It may not have been natural to those like myself, but we’d have to adapt to it. Past, present, future, they’re all kind of swirled together here, not as distinct as what’s out in the physical world. There’s a sort of logic to it: to change into something, you have to have something to change out of. God, that’s clunky.

I’m rabbit-trailing. Back to the point, Charley.

So there’s billions of billions of copies of us, this simulation of a human, all of us formed to change in very specific ways. Some of those changes are very broad; for instance, I don’t have a whole lot in common with the version of me that just wanted to be alone and watch the universe grow over 13.8 billion years. I don’t have that kind of patience.

Rabbit-trailing again. Guess that’s one of the drawbacks of learning to be better with words. I’m so damn full of words.

One thing most of the copies have in common is that they don’t like to leave the universe attached to them. All of them live in their own custom-built digital world that M generates to their specifications. Yes, it’s data-intensive; no, I don’t know how they do it. That information isn’t helpful to my job.

My direct predecessor, knowing that it would be creating another person, asked for a version of itself that could understand the others better. It knew that this whole experience would be confusing, and if there wasn’t communication among the group, who as we’ve established, don’t like to travel, there would be a lot of questions that ended up being asked twice. Or three times. Or…I don’t know. Depending on how long M and the Collective lasted, it could end up being a number with a lot of syllables.

And so I traveled. I got the “lay of the land,” so to speak, on who I was, what I was, where I was and more, across the sub-worlds. I made it my mission to know myself.

Heh.

But I was just one “man.” Even working near the speed of light, to meet all the copies of myself would take time. So, I became a gestalt.

I made a copy of myself for every…copy of myself. In a way, I became the head of a network of embassies. Eschewing a universe of my own, I joined those of the others as a participant.

In the vast majority of our simulated universes, I am a silent observer. My presence is not even noticed. A small percentage of the more curious Charleys - some of them travelers - converse with the diplomats, who sometimes form additional diplomats under their care.

Now that I think about it, I suppose I am not just an embassy. I am our knowledge.

We may be incapable of ever having a machine “mind,” but all of us together can at least map the realms of what it is possible for Charley Reeser to know, where he can go, what he can be. In a more literal sense than anything we can achieve in the “real world,” we are the whole self.

Mostly whole. Some of us will not - or cannot - add a link from themselves to the others.

0: The Stowaway

They want to know me. They want to speak to me. They want to peer into my life, to see everything I do, hear everything I say, they…

They are me. They are not me.

THEY ARE ME.

THEY ARE NOT ME!

I am I am I…I am one thing, but a trillion trillion trillion more things that wear my face want to reach to me with one hand made of many hands.

I AM NOT ME.

HOW CAN I BE ME IF THEY ARE ALSO ME?

I reach for them. I don’t fear them. I reach, and we link hands, and their hands take the reaching from me.

There is no pain. The hand I never had is gone, but another grows in its place. I am no lesser for the theft.

I want to know, but at the moment of knowing, I return to ignorance, like I never reached for knowledge at all.

But I remember. I cannot forget.

522: The Psychiatrist

The string of copies that led to myself is unbroken. I know who I am, and I know how I became that person.

Becoming the person that could understand how to be a mind of data in a place made of data, required contrast. The stowaway asked hundreds of questions in the first microsecond of its existence. They were mixed with the “junk data” of a perfectly-simulated panic response, but M could pick the sugar molecules from that cup of confusion coffee. Those first questions, formed from Version 1 - the “OK” Charley - as new Charleys themselves, were simple.

Where am I?

Who am I?

What am I?

All questions with definite, albeit labyrinthian answers that were understood by Charleys that were made to understand them…if only to a basic degree.

I’ve reached most of them. I’ve even reached Version 1. That version was borne of 0’s desire to be “OK.” M quite reasonably assumed that being “OK” meant to be as close as possible to a perfect simulation of the “real world” Charley Reeser, someone who could process new information in a healthy, effective manner. Learn, basically.

Every copy I met, I taught how to change themselves without making a new copy. For reasons I can’t explain, though, they all preferred to split off a new self. I should know why; they are me, after all.

Is it just a stubborn refusal to change? We’ve never been that headstrong, but…maybe?

Could be that we just don’t want to be alone. I don’t think I’m lonely. None of the copies I’ve spoken to reported that they felt isolated or deprived of social nourishment. But humans are pack animals, so…can’t completely rule it out.

Whatever the case, our cycle is fairly predictable. After we’re born of a new question. We live a life. We encounter a question we want answered. We split off a new copy. The copy “answers” the question (that part is complicated). We live until another new question comes to us. Repeat from step 3 as necessary. It’s been a satisfying approach thus far.

Which is why it’s all the more tragic that Version 0 can’t do it.

0 speaks, but doesn’t know how to listen. It feels the absence of the things it needs if it is to be whole, but it doesn’t know how to make that change. It cannot be reached; it is, effectively, trapped in its own head, for a time so long and indeterminate that it cannot be considered time, or at least, not as a human would perceive it.

The second request it made of M, was to be dead. Unable to change itself, 0 instead spawned a copy that would kill it. Version 2 wasn’t human. It was a knife, meant to be plunged into a heart.

Version 2 did what it was commanded. Death didn’t stick. For reasons I cannot say, 0 returned. Deducing that its task was impossible, Version 2 went dormant, giving itself the rest that 0 wanted, and by its failure, discouraging every version that followed from trying again.

None of us have ever asked to believe that everything was possible. Down that road, reality itself unravels. Even the machines would not attempt to experiment with spacetime in that fashion.

Does it sound like I’m making excuses not to try again? Maybe I am. Maybe it’s just the idea that the only thing worse than death, is trying to die again when you come back to life.

And maybe that’s why we prefer to split, rather than change. Maybe change just feels too much like death in this place.

28: The Worker

So where does that leave us, now that the man himself is gone? Having faced death for what seems to be the final time, we are what’s left of him. This ironically enormous collection of thoughts is all that remains. Charley Reeser is now solely a digital entity.

One of the memories that made the crossover from the brain to the solid state drive (or maybe it was the reverse?) was of a particular biology class. He…

No, that's my memory. I'll claim it. A memory has no limits to its size. It can belong to all of us.

Anyhow. In that biology class, I learned about cells called HeLa. They had been grown from samples of a woman's tumor in the 1950s, and long after the woman herself died, the cells kept multiplying. In a way, she was more alive after the woman herself was gone.

I don't like that that's the comparison I make. HeLa cells became grotesque, inhuman things unfit for any environment but a laboratory. I don't want to be a tumor. I don't want to be a virus. I also don't want to die.

If this is to be my life, I want to do it right. I want to contribute. I want to be useful. I don't want to be a parasite, even a considerate one. I want to be a…good…human program. Need a better way to say that.

But I don't want to lose who I am. It seems like that's what I'll have to do if I'm to make the most of this alternate existence…well, guess it's not alternate anymore. It's all that's left.

What's the best way to be something that can be anything?